and finest quality.  Is not that enough?  I cannot understand the mere credit we give to work, without any reference to the object of the work, or the spirit in which it is done.  We think with respect of the man who makes a fortune, or who fills an official post, the duties of which do nothing in particular for any one.  It is a kind of obsession with us practical Westerners; of course a man ought to contribute to the necessary work of the world; but many men spend their lives in work which is not necessary; and, after all, we are sent into the world to live, and work is only a part of life.  We work to live, we do not live to work.  Even if we were all socialists, we should, I hope, have the grace to dig the gardens and make the clothes of our poets and prophets, so as to give them the leisure they need.

I do not question the instinct of my hero in the matter; he lives eagerly and peacefully; he touches into light the spirits of those who draw near to him; and I admire a man who knows how to stop when he has done his best work, and does not spur and whip his tired mind into producing feebler, limper, duller work of the same kind; how few of our great writers have known when to hold their hand!

God be praised for great men!  My poet to-day has made me feel that life is a thing to be lived eagerly and high-heartedly; that the world is full of beautiful, generous, kindly things, of free air and sunshine; and that we ought to find leisure to drink it all in, and to send our hearts out in search of love and beauty and God—­ for these things are all about us, if we could but feel and hear and see them.

October 12, 1888.

How absurd it is to say that a writer could not write a large, wise, beautiful book unless he had a great soul—­is it almost like saying that an artist could not paint a fine face unless he had a fine face himself.  It is all a question of seeing clearly, and having a skilled hand.  There is nothing to make one believe that Shakespeare had a particularly noble or beautiful character; and some of our greatest writers have been men of unbalanced, childish, immature temperaments, full of vanity and pettiness.  Of course a man must be interested in what he is describing; but I think that a man of a naturally great, wise, and lofty spirit is so disposed as a rule to feel that his qualities are instinctive, and so ready to credit other people with them, that it does not occur to him to depict those qualities.  I am not sure that the best equipment for an artist is not that he should see and admire great and noble and beautiful things, and feel his own deficiency in them acutely, desiring them with the desire of the moth for the star.  The best characters in my own books have been, I am sure, the people least like myself, because the creation of a character that one whole-heartedly admires, and that yet is far out of one’s reach, is the most restful and delightful thing in the world.  If one is unready in speech, thinking of one’s