full of the mysterious romance of deep forests and haunted glades.  I was overshadowed that afternoon with a sense of the ineffectiveness, the loneliness of my life, walking in a vain shadow; but it melted out of my mind in the delicate beauty of the woodland, with its wild fragrances and cool airs, as when one chafes one’s frozen hands before a leaping flame.  They told me, those whispering groves, of the patient and tender love of the Father, and I drew very near His inmost heart in that gentle hour.  The secret was to bear, to endure, not stoically nor stolidly, but with a quiet inclination of the will to sorrow and pain, that were not so bitter after all, when one abode faithfully in them.  I became aware, as I walked, that my heart was with the future after all.  The beautiful dead past, I could be grateful for it, and not desire that it were mine again.  I felt as a man might feel who is making his way across a wide moor.  “Surely,” he says to himself, “the way lies here; this ridge, that dingle mark the track; it lies there by the rushy pool, and shows greener among the heather.”  So he says, persuading himself in vain that he has found the way; but at last the track, plain and unmistakable, lies before him, and he loses no more time in imaginings, but goes straight forward.  It was my sorrow, after all, that had shown me that I was in the true path.  I had tried, in the old days, to fancy that I was homeward bound; sometimes it was in the love of my dear ones, sometimes in the joy of art, sometimes in my chosen work; and yet I knew in my heart all the time that I was but a leisurely wanderer; but now at last the destined road was clear; I was no longer astray; I was no longer inventing duties and acts for myself, but I had in very truth a note of the way.  It was not the path I should have chosen in my blindness and easiness.  But there could no longer be any doubt about it.  How the false ambitions, the comfortable schemes, the trivial hopes melted away for me in that serene certainty!  What I had pursued before was the phantom of delight; and though I still desired delight, with all the passion of my poor frail nature, yet I saw that not thus could the real joy of God be won.  It was no longer a question of hope and disappointment, of sin and punishment.  It was something truer and stronger than that.  The sin and the suffering alike had been the Will of God for me.  I had never desired evil, though I had often fallen into it; but there was never a moment when, if I could, I would not have been pure and unselfish and strong.  That was a blessed hour for me, when, in place of the old luxurious delight, there came, flooding my heart, an intense and passionate desire that I might accept with a loving confidence whatever God might send; my wearied body, my tired, anxious mind, were but a slender veil, rent and ruinous, that hung between God and my soul, through which I could discern the glory of His love.

June 20, 1891.