a wise man would content himself with composing some placid literary essays, selecting some lesser figure in the world of letters, collecting gossip, and what are called “side-lights,” about him, visiting his birthplace and early haunts, criticising his writings.  That would be a harmless way of filling the time.  But any one who has ever tried creative work gets filled with a nauseating disgust for making books out of other people’s writings, and constructing a kind of resurrection-pie out of the shreds.  Moreover I know nothing except literature; I could only write a literary biography; and it has always seemed to me a painful irony that men who have put into their writings what other people put into deeds and acts should be the very people whose lives are sedulously written and rewritten, generation after generation.  The instinct is natural enough.  The vivid memories of statesmen and generals fade; but as long as we have the fascinating and adorable reveries of great spirits, we are consumed with a desire to reconstruct their surroundings, that we may learn where they found their inspiration.  A great poet, a great imaginative writer, so glorifies and irradiates the scene in which his mighty thoughts came to him, that we cannot help fancying that the secret lies in crag and hill and lake, rather than in the mind that gathered in the common joy.  I have a passion for visiting the haunts of genius, but rather because they teach me that inspiration lies everywhere, if we can but perceive it, than because I hope to detect where the particular charm lay.  And so I am driven back upon my own poor imagination.  I say to myself, like Samson, “I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself,” and then the end of the verse falls on me like a shadow—­“and he wist not that the Lord was departed from him.”

January 18, 1889.

Nothing the matter, and yet everything the matter!  I plough on drearily enough, like a vessel forging slowly ahead against a strong, ugly, muddy stream.  I seem to gain nothing, neither hope, patience, nor strength.  My spirit revolted at first, but now I have lost the heart even for that:  I simply bear my burden and wait.  One tends to think, at such times, that no one has ever passed through a similar experience before; and the isolation in which one moves is the hardest part of it all.  Alone, and cut off even from God!  If one felt that one was learning something, gaining power or courage, one could bear it cheerfully; but I feel rather as though all my vitality and moral strength was being pressed and drained from me.  Yet I do not desire death and silence.  I rather crave for life and light.