“In the last month I have really turned a corner, and gained serenity and patience in my outlook.  I do not mean that I am either patient or serene yet, but I have long and considerable spaces of both, when I feel content to let God make or mar me as He will, and realise that perhaps in His mind those two words may bear a precisely contrary sense.

“One thing I wish to tell you, which I am afraid you will be rather shocked to hear.  I have not told you before, from a culpable reticence; for I believe that there must be either complete confidence between friends or none at all—­

“Do you remember a very gloomy and depressed letter that I wrote to you the other day?  When I wrote it I was deliberately contemplating an action which I have now given up:  I mean a voluntary exit from this world’s disappointments—­suicide, in fact.

“For many years I have carried about a quietus with me.  I began the habit at Cambridge.  Men have often asked me what is the curious little flask with a secret fastening, that stands on my dressing-table.  It is prussic acid.  The morning before I wrote that letter, the impulse was so strong upon me that I determined, if matters should not shift a little, to take it on the following evening.  I made, in fact, most methodical arrangements.  I seemed so completely to have missed my mark.  The superstitions against the practice I did not regard, as they are merely the produce of a more imaginative and anxious system of morality.  I did not see why God, for His own purposes—­and, what is more, I believe He does—­should not remove a man by suicide, if He allows him to die by a horrible disease or relegates him to insanity.  Suicide is only a symptom of a certain pitch of mental distress:  its incidental result is death, but so it is of many practices not immoral.

“It required considerable nerve, I confess, to make the resolution; but once made, I did not flinch.  I considered the impulse to be a true leading, quite as true as the other intuitions which I have before now successfully followed, so I made my arrangements all day.  It gave me a wonderful sense of calm and certainty—­there was a feeling of repose about the completion of a restless existence, as if I was at last about to slide into quiet waters, and be taught directly, and not by obscure and painful monitions.

“At nine o’clock I went to my room.  There was a full moon, which shone in at the open window; the garden was wonderfully still and fragrant.

“I found myself wondering whether, when the thing was over, I should awake to consciousness at once; whether the freed soul would have, so to speak, a local origin, a terminus a quo:  in plain words, whether my spirit would pass through the house and through the quiet garden to some mysterious home, taking in the earthly impression as it soared past with a single complete undimmed sense—­or whether I should step, as it were, straight into a surrounding sea of sensation and be merged at once, feeling through all space and time and matter by the spiritual fibres of which I should make a part.  Do you understand me?  I have often wondered at that.