fused and blended by his personality; they have not affected his mind, nor has his mind affected them.  I don’t wish to despise or to decry his knowledge; as a lecturer, he must be invaluable; but he treats literature as a purveyor might—­it has not been food to him, but material and stock-in-trade.  Some of the poetry we talked about—­Elizabethan lyrics—­grow in my mind like flowers in a copse; in his mind they are planted in rows, with their botanical names on tickets.  The worst of it is that I do not even feel encouraged to fill up my gaps of knowledge, or to master the history of tendency.  I feel as if he had rather trampled down the hyacinths and anemones in my wild and uncultivated woodlands.  I should like, in a dim way, to have his knowledge as well as my own appreciation, but I would not exchange my knowledge for his.  The value of a lyric or a beautiful sentence, for me, is its melody, its charm, its mysterious thrill; and there are many books and poems, which I know to be excellent of their kind, but which have no meaning or message for me.  He seems to think that it is important to have complete texts of old authors, and I do not think that he makes much distinction between first-rate and second-rate work.  In fact, I think that his view of literature is the sociological view, and he seems to care more about tendencies and influences than about the beauty and appeal of literature.  I do not go so far as to say or to think that literature cannot be treated scientifically; but I feel as I feel about the doctor in Balzac, I think, who, when his wife cried upon his shoulder, said, “Hold, I have analysed tears,” adding that they contained so much chlorate of sodium and so much mucus.  The truth is that he is a philosopher, and that I am an individualist; but it leaves me with an intense desire to be left alone in my woodland, or, at all events, not to walk there with a ruthless botanist!

November 29, 1888.

I have heard this morning of the suicide of an old friend.  Is it strange to say that I have heard the news with an unfeigned relief, even gladness?  He was formerly a charming and brilliant creature, full of enthusiasm and artistic impulses, fitful, wayward, wilful.  Somehow he missed his footing; he fell into disreputable courses; he did nothing, but drifted about, planning many things, executing nothing.  The last time I saw him was exquisitely painful; we met by appointment, and I could see that he had tried to screw himself up for the interview by stimulants.  The ghastly feigning of cheerfulness, the bloated face, the trembling hands, told the sad tale.  And now that it is all over, the shame and the decay, the horror of his having died by his own act is a purely conventional one.  One talks pompously about the selfishness of it, but it is one of the most unselfish things poor Dick has ever done; he was a burden and a misery to all those who cared for him.  Recovery was, I sincerely believe, impossible.  His was a fine, uplifted, even noble spirit in youth,