I was sorry, as I went away, to leave the poor maidservant to her lonely and desolate memories.  She had to leave her comfortable kitchen and her easy routine, for new duties and new faces, and I could see that she anticipated the change with sad dismay.

It seemed to me in that hour as though the cruelty and the tenderness of the world were very mysteriously blended—­there was no lack of tenderness in the old house with its innumerable small associations, its sheltered calm.  And then suddenly the stroke must fall, and fall upon lives whose very security and gentleness seemed to have been so ill a preparation for sterner and darker things.  It would have been more loving, one thought, either to have made the whole fabric more austere, more precarious from the first; or else to have bestowed a deep courage and a fertile hope, a firmer endurance, rather than to have confronted lives so frail and delicate with the terrors of the vast unknown.

April 8, 1890.

Our new house is charming, beautiful, homelike.  It is an old stone building, formerly a farm; it has a quaint garden and orchard, and the wooded hill runs up steeply behind, with a stream in front.  It is on the outskirts of a village, and we are within three miles of Maud’s old home, so that she knows all the country round.  We have got two of our old servants, and a solid comfortable gardener, a native of the place.  The house within is quaint and comfortable.  We have a spare bedroom; I have no study, but shall use the little panelled dining-room.  We have had much to do in settling in, and I have done a great deal of hard physical work myself, in the way of moving furniture and hanging pictures, inducing much wholesome fatigue.  Maggie, who broke down dreadfully on leaving the old home, with the wonderful spring that children have, is full of excitement and even delight in the new house.  I rather dread the time when all our occupations shall be over, and when we shall settle down to the routine of life.  I begin to wonder how I shall occupy myself.  I mean to do a good many odd jobs—­we have no trap, and there will be a good deal of fetching and carrying to be done.  We shall resume our lessons, Maggie and I; there will be reading, gardening, walking.  One ought to be able to live philosophically enough.  What would I not give to be able to write now! but the instinct seems wholly and utterly dead and gone.  I cannot even conceive that I ever used, solemnly and gravely, to write about imaginary people, their jests and epigrams, their sorrows and cares.  Life and Art!  I used to suppose that it was all a softly moulded, rhythmic, sonorous affair, strophe and antistrophe; but the griefs and sorrows of art are so much nearer each other, like major and minor keys, than the griefs and sorrows of life.  In art, the musician smiles and sighs alternately, but his sighing is a balanced, an ordered mood; the inner heart is content, as the pool is content, whether it mirrors the sunlight or the lonely star; but in life, joy is to grief what music is to aching silence, dumbness, inarticulate pain—­though perhaps in that silence one hears a deeper, stranger sound, the buzz of the whirring atom, the soft thunder of worlds plunging through the void, joyless, gigantic, oblivious forces.