who is peculiar and in a peculiar position; but it pained me that——­, who knew all that passed last year—­for instance, about Pisa—­who knew that the alternative of making a single effort to secure my health during the winter was the severe displeasure I have incurred now, and that the fruit of yielding myself a prisoner was the sense of being of no use nor comfort to any soul; papa having given up coming to see me except for five minutes, a day; ==—­, who said to me with his own lips, ‘He does not love you—­do not think it’ (said and repeated it two months ago)—­that ——­ should now turn round and reproach me for want of affection towards my family, for not letting myself drop like a dead weight into the abyss, a sacrifice without an object and expiation—­this did surprise me and pain me—­pained me more than all papa’s dreadful words.  But the personal feeling is nearer with most of us than the tenderest feeling for another; and my family had been so accustomed to the idea of my living on and on in that room, that while my heart was eating itself, their love for me was consoled, and at last the evil grew scarcely perceptible.  It was no want of love in them, and quite natural in itself:  we all get used to the thought of a tomb; and I was buried, that was the whole.  It was a little thing even for myself a short time ago, and really it would be a pneumatological curiosity if I could describe and let you see how perfectly for years together, after what broke my heart at Torquay, I lived on the outside of my own life, blindly and darkly from day to day, as completely dead to hope of any kind as if I had my face against a grave, never feeling a personal instinct, taking trains of thought to carry out as an occupation absolutely indifferent to the me which is in every human being.  Nobody quite understood this of me, because I am not morally a coward, and have a hatred of all the forms of audible groaning.  But God knows what is within, and how utterly I had abdicated myself and thought it not worth while to put out my finger to touch my share of life.  Even my poetry, which suddenly grew an interest, was a thing on the outside of me, a thing to be done, and then done!  What people said of it did not touch me.  A thoroughly morbid and desolate state it was, which I look back now to with the sort of horror with which one would look to one’s graveclothes, if one had been clothed in them by mistake during a trance.

[Footnote 147:  The date at the head of the letter is October 2, but that is certainly a slip of the pen, since at that date, as the following letter to Miss Mitford shows, they had not reached Pisa.  See also the reference to ‘six weeks of marriage’ on p. 295.  The Pisa postmark appears to be October 20 (or later), and the English postmark is November 5.]