August 25, 1890.

Maud has been ailing of late—­how much it is impossible to say, because she is always cheerful and indomitable.  She never complains, she never neglects a duty; but I have found her, several times of late, sitting alone, unoccupied, musing—­that is unlike her—­and with a certain shadow upon her face that I do not recognise; but the strange, new, sweet companionship in which we live seems at the same time to have heightened and deepened.  I seem to have lived so close to her all these years, and yet of late to have found a new and different personality in her, which I never suspected.  Perhaps we have both changed somewhat; I do not feel the difference in myself.  But there is something larger, stronger, deeper about Maud now, as if she had ascended into a purer air, and caught sight of some unexpected, undreamed-of distance; but instead of giving her remoteness, she seems to be sharing her wider outlook with me; she was never a great talker—­perhaps it was that in old days my own mind ran like an ebullient fountain, evoking no definite response, needing no interchange; but she was always a sayer of penetrating things.  She has a wonderful gift of seeing the firm issue through a cloud of mixed suggestions; but of late there has been a richness, a generosity, a wisdom about her which I have never recognised before.  I think, with contrition, that I under-estimated, not her judgment or instinct, but her intellect.  I am sure I lived too much in the intellectual region, and did not guess how little it really solves, in what a limited region it disports itself.  I see that this wisdom was hers all along, and that I have been blind to it; but now that I have travelled out of the intellectual region, I perceive what a much greater thing that further wisdom is than I had thought.  Living in art and for art, I used to believe that the intellectual structure was the one thing that mattered, but now I perceive dimly that the mind is but on the threshold of the soul, and that the artist may, nay does, often perceive, by virtue of his trained perception, what is going on in the sanctuary; but he is as one who kneels in a church at some great solemnity—­he sees the movements and gestures of the priests; he sees the holy rite proceeding, he hears the sacred words; something of the inner spirit of it all flows out to him; but the viewless current of prayer, the fiery ray streaming down from God, that smites itself into the earthly symbol—­all this is hidden from him.  Those priests, intent upon the sacred work, feel something that they not only do not care to express, but which they would not if they could; it would be a profanation of the awful mystery.  The artist is not profane in expressing what he perceives, because he can be the interpreter of the symbol to others more remote; but he is not a real partaker of the mystery; he is a seer of the word and not a doer.  What now amazes me is that Maud, to whom the heart of the matter, the inner emotion,