Maud and the children went off this afternoon to an entertainment.  I accompanied them to the door; what a pretty effect the snow background gives to young faces; it lends a pretty morbidezza to the colouring, a sort of very delicate green tinge to the paler shades.  That does not sound as if it would be beautiful in a human face, but it is; the faces look like the child-angels of Botticelli, and the pink and rose flush of the cheeks is softly enriched and subdued; and then the soft warmth of fair and curly hair is delicious.  I was happy enough with them, in a sort of surface happiness.  The little waves at the top of the mind broke in sunlight; but down below, the cold dark water sleeps still enough.  I left them, and took a long trudge among the valleys.  Oh me! how beautiful it all was; the snowy fields, with the dark copses and leafless trees among them; the rich clean light everywhere, the world seen as through a dusky crystal.  Then the sun went down in state, and the orange sky through the dark tree-stems brought me a thrill of that strange yearning desire for something—­I cannot tell what—­that seems so near and yet so far away.  Yet I was sad enough too; my mind works like a mill with no corn to grind.  I can devise nothing, think of nothing.  There beats in my head a verse of a little old Latin poem, by an unhappy man enough, in whose sorrowful soul the delight of the beautiful moment was for ever poisoned by the thought that it was passing, passing; and that the spirit, whatever joy might be in store for it, could never again be at the same sweet point of its course.  The poem is about a woodcock, a belated bird that haunted the hanging thickets of his Devonshire home.  “Ah, hapless bird,” he says, “for you to-day King December is stripping these oaks; nor any hope of food do the hazel-thickets afford.”  That is my case.  I have lingered too late, trusting to the ease and prodigal wealth of the summer, and now the woods stand bare about me, while my comrades have taken wing for the South.  The beady eye, the puffed feathers grow sick and dulled with hunger.  Why cannot I rest a little in the beauty all about me?  Take it home to my shivering soul?  Nay, I will not complain, even to myself.

I came back at sundown, through the silent garden, all shrouded and muffled with snow.  The snow lay on the house, outlining the cornices, cresting the roof-tiles, crusted sharply on the cupola, whitening the tall chimney-stacks.  The comfortable smoke went up into the still air, and the firelight darted in the rooms.  What a sense of beautiful permanence, sweet hopefulness, fireside warmth it all gave; and it is real as well.  No life that I could have devised is so rich in love and tranquillity as mine; everything to give me content, except the contented mind.  Why cannot I enter, seat myself in the warm firelight, open a book, and let the old beautiful thoughts flow into my mind, till the voices of wife and children return to gladden me, and I listen to all that they have seen and done?  Why should I rather sit, like a disconsolate child among its bricks, feebly and sadly planning new combinations and fantastic designs?  I have done as much and more than most of my contemporaries; what is this insensate hunger of the spirit that urges me to work that I cannot do, for rewards that I do not want?  Why cannot I be content to dream and drowse a little?