into his drugged and indulgent seclusion!  Here then are three great souls.  Ruskin, the pure lover of things noble and beautiful, but shadowed by a prim perversity, an old-maidish delicacy, a petulant despair.  Carlyle, a great, rugged, and tumultuous heart, brutalised by ill-health, morbidity, selfishness.  Rossetti, a sort of day-star in art, stepping forth like an angel, to fall lower than Lucifer.  What is the meaning of these strange catastrophes, these noble natures so infamously hampered?  In the three cases, it seems to be that melancholy, brooding over a world, so exquisitely designed and yet so unaccountably marred, drove one to madness, one to gloom, one to sensuality.  We believe or try to believe that God is pure and loving and true, and that His Heart is with all that is noble and hopeful and high.  Yet the more generous the character, the deeper is the fall!  Can such things be meant to show us that we have no concern with art at all; and that our only hope is to cling to bare, austere, simple, uncomforted virtue?  Ought we to try to think of art only as an innocent amusement and diversion for our leisure hours?  As a quest to which no man may vow himself, save at the cost of walking in a vain shadow all his days?  Ought we to steel our hearts against the temptation, which seems to be implanted as deep as anything in my own nature—­nay, deeper—­to hold that what one calls ugliness and bad taste is of the nature of sin?  But what then is the meaning of the tyrannous instinct to select and to represent, to capture beauty?  Ought it to be enough to see beauty in the things around us, in flowers and light, to hear it in the bird’s song and the falling stream—­to perceive it thus gratefully and thankfully, and to go back to our simple lives?  I do not know; it is all a great mystery; it is so hard to believe that God should put these ardent, delicious, sweet, and solemn instincts into our spirits, simply that we may learn our error in following them.  And yet I feel with a sad certainty to-day that I have somehow missed the way, and that God cannot or will not help me to find it.  Are we then bidden and driven to wander?  Or is there indeed some deep and perfect secret of peace and tranquillity, which we are meant to find?  Does it perhaps lie open to our eyes—­ as when one searches a table over and over for some familiar object, which all the while is there before us, plain to touch or sight?

January 3, 1889.

There is a tiny vignette of Blake’s, a woodcut, I think, in which one sees a ladder set up to the crescent moon from a bald and bare corner of the globe.  There are two figures that seem to be conversing together; on the ladder itself, just setting his foot to the lowest rung, is the figure of a man who is beginning to climb in a furious hurry.  “I want, I want,” says the little legend beneath.  The execution is trivial enough; it is all done, and not very well done, in a space not much bigger than a postage-stamp—­ but it is one of the many