Of course to one so modern as I am, ‘Enfant de mon siecle,’ merely to look at the world will be always lovely.  I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.  Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose.  It has always been so with me from my boyhood.  There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer.  Like Gautier, I have always been one of those ‘pour qui le monde visible existe.’

Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony.  I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things.  The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for.  It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere.

All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried.  The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years.  Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed.  She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt:  she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.—­De Profundis.

DOMESTICITY AT BERNEVAL

DIEPPE,

June 1st, 1897.

My Dear Robbie,—­I propose to live at Berneval.  I will not live in Paris, nor in Algiers, nor in Southern Italy.  Surely a house for a year, if I choose to continue there, at 32 pounds is absurdly cheap.  I could not live cheaper at a hotel.  You are penny foolish, and pound foolish—­a dreadful state for my financier to be in.  I told M. Bonnet that my bankers were MM.  Ross et Cie, banquiers celebres de Londres—­and now you suddenly show me that you have no place among the great financial people, and are afraid of any investment