been praised by all the reviewers.  How did I invent it?  I do not know.  I had no idea what the characters were to say when I began to write it, but one remark grew inevitably and surely out of the one before.  I was never at a loss; I never stuck fast; indeed the one temptation which I firmly and constantly resisted was the temptation to write morning, noon, and night.  Sometimes I had a horrible fear that I might not live to set down what was so clear in my mind; but there is a certain freshness which comes of self-restraint.  Day after day, as I strolled, and read, and talked, I used to hug myself at the thought of the beloved evening hours that were coming, when I should fling myself upon the book with a passionate zest, and feel it grow under my hand.  And then it was done!  I remember writing the last words, and the conviction came upon me that it was the end.  There was more to be told; the story stretched on into the distance; but it was as though the frame of the picture had suddenly fallen upon the canvas, and I knew that just so much and no more was to be seen.  And then, as though to show me plainly that the work was over, the next day came an event which drew my mind off the book.  I had had a period of unclouded health and leisure, everything had combined to help me, and then this event, of which I need not speak, came and closed the book at the right moment.

What wonder if one grows fatalistic about writing; that one feels that one can only say what is given one to say!  And now, dry and arid as my mind is, I would give all I have for a renewal of that beautiful glow, which I cannot recover.  It is misery—­I can conceive no greater—­to be bound hand and foot in this helpless silence.

November 6, 1888.

It is a joy to think of the way in which the best, most beautiful, most permanent things have stolen unnoticed into life.  I like to think of Wordsworth, an obscure, poor, perverse, absurd man, living in the corner of the great house at Alfoxden, walking in the moonlight with Coleridge, living on milk and eggs, utterly unaccountable and puerile to the sensible man of affairs, while the two planned the Lyrical Ballads.  I like to think of Keats, sitting lazily and discontentedly in the villa garden at Hampstead, with his illness growing upon him and his money melting away, scribbling the “Ode to the Nightingale,” and caring so little about the fate of it that it was only by chance, as it were, that the pencil scraps were rescued from the book where he had shut them.  I love to think of Charlotte Bronte, in the bare kitchen of the little house in the grey, wind-swept village on the edge of the moorland, penning, in sickness and depression, the scenes of Jane Eyre, without a thought that she was doing anything unusual or lasting.  We surround such scenes with a heavenly halo, born of the afterglow of fame; we think them romantic, beautiful, thrilled and flushed by passionate joy; but there was little that was delightful about them at the time.