divine it; an oracle of God, if I could but catch the words He
utters in the darkness and the silence.



February 1, 1889.


My dissatisfaction and depression begin to tell on me. I grow
nervous and strained; I am often sleepless, or my sleep is filled
by vivid, horrible, intolerable dreams. I wake early in the clutch
of fear. I wrestle at times with intolerable irritability; social
gatherings become unbearable; I have all sorts of unmanning
sensations, dizzinesses, tremors; I have that dreadful sensation
that my consciousness of things and people around me is slipping
away from me, and that only by a strong effort can one retain one's
hold upon them. I fall into a sort of dull reverie, and come back
to the real world with a shock of surprise and almost horror. I
went the other day to consult a great doctor about this. He
reassured me; he laughed at my fears; he told me that it was a kind
of neurasthenia, not fanciful but real; that my brain had been
overworked, and was taking its revenge; that it was insufficiently
nourished, and so forth. He knew who I was, and treated me with a
respectful sympathy. I told him I had taken a prolonged holiday
since my last book, and he replied that it had not been long
enough. "You must take it easy," he said. "Don't do anything you
don't like." I replied that the difficulty was to find anything I
did like. He smiled at this, and said that I need not be afraid of
breaking down; he sounded me, and said that I was perfectly strong.
"Indeed," he added, "you might go to a dozen doctors to be examined