FitzGerald said somewhere that ill-health makes all of us villains.  This is the worst of it, that for all my efforts I get weaker, more easily vexed, more discontented.  I do not and cannot trace the smallest benefit which results to me or any one else from my unhappiness.  The shadow of it has even fallen over my relations with the children, who are angelically good.  Maggie, with that divine instinct which women possess—­what a perfectly beautiful thing it is!—­has somehow contrived to discern that things are amiss with me, and I can perceive that she tries all that her little heart and mind can devise to please, soothe, interest me.  But I do not want to be ministered to, exquisite as the instinct is in the child; and all the time I am as far off my object as ever.  I cannot work, I cannot think.  I have said fine things in my books about the discipline of reluctant suffering; and now my feeling is that I could bear any other kind of trial better.  It seems to be given to me with an almost demoniacal prescience of what should most dishearten me.

   “It would not school the shuddering will
    To patience, were it sweet to bear,”

says an old poet; and it is true, I have no doubt; but, good God, to think that a man, so richly dowered as I am with every conceivable blessing, should yet have so small a reserve of faith and patience!  Even now I can frame epigrams about it.  “To learn to be content not to be content”—­that is the secret—­but meanwhile I stumble in dark paths, through the grove nullo penetrabilis astro, where men have wandered before now.  It seems fine and romantic enough, when one thinks of another soul in torment.  One remembers the old sage, reading quietly at a sunset hour, who had a sudden vision of the fate that should befall him.  His book falls from his hands, he sits there, a beautiful and venerable figure enough, staring heavily into the void.  It makes me feel that I shall never dare to draw the picture of a man in the grip of suffering again; I have had so little of it in my life, and I have drawn it with a luxurious artistic emotion.  I remember once saying of a friend that his work was light and trivial, because he had never descended into hell.  Now that I have myself set foot there, I feel art and love, and life itself, shrivel in the relentless chill—­for it is icy cold and drearily bright in hell, not dark and fiery, as poets have sung!  I feel that I could wrestle better with the loss of health, of wealth, of love, for there would be something to bear, some burden to lift.  Now there is nothing to bear, except a blank purposelessness which eats the heart out of me.  I am in the lowest place, in the darkness and the deep.

January 8, 1889.

Snow underfoot this morning; and a brown blink on the horizon which shows that more is coming.  I have the odd feeling that I have never really seen my house before, the snow lights it all up so strangely, tinting the ceilings a glowing white, touching up high lights on the top of picture-frames, and throwing the lower part of the rooms into a sort of pleasant dusk.