No, I am not describing my state fairly.  At times I have a sense that something, some power, some great influence, is trying to communicate with me, to deliver me some message.  There are many hours when it is not so, when my nerveless brain seems losing its hold, slipping off into some dark confusion of sense.  Yet again there are other moments, when sights and sounds have an overpowering and awful significance; when the gleams of some tremendous secret seemed flashed upon my mind, at the sight of the mist-hung valley with its leafless woods and level water-meadows; the flaring pomp of sunset hung low in the west over the bare ploughland or the wide-watered plain; the wailing of the wind round the firelit house; the faint twitter of awakening birds in the ivy; the voice and smile of my children; the music breaking the silence of the house at evening.  In a moment the sensation comes over me, that the sound or sight is sent not vaguely or lightly, but deliberately shown to me, for some great purpose, if I could but divine it; an oracle of God, if I could but catch the words He utters in the darkness and the silence.

February 1, 1889.

My dissatisfaction and depression begin to tell on me.  I grow nervous and strained; I am often sleepless, or my sleep is filled by vivid, horrible, intolerable dreams.  I wake early in the clutch of fear.  I wrestle at times with intolerable irritability; social gatherings become unbearable; I have all sorts of unmanning sensations, dizzinesses, tremors; I have that dreadful sensation that my consciousness of things and people around me is slipping away from me, and that only by a strong effort can one retain one’s hold upon them.  I fall into a sort of dull reverie, and come back to the real world with a shock of surprise and almost horror.  I went the other day to consult a great doctor about this.  He reassured me; he laughed at my fears; he told me that it was a kind of neurasthenia, not fanciful but real; that my brain had been overworked, and was taking its revenge; that it was insufficiently nourished, and so forth.  He knew who I was, and treated me with a respectful sympathy.  I told him I had taken a prolonged holiday since my last book, and he replied that it had not been long enough.  “You must take it easy,” he said.  “Don’t do anything you don’t like.”  I replied that the difficulty was to find anything I did like.  He smiled at this, and said that I need not be afraid of breaking down; he sounded me, and said that I was perfectly strong.  “Indeed,” he added, “you might go to a dozen doctors to be examined for an insurance policy, and you would be returned as absolutely robust.”  In the course of his investigations, he applied a test, quite casually and as if he were hardly interested, the point of which he thought (I suppose) that I should not divine.  Unfortunately I knew it, and I need only say that it was a test for something very bad indeed.  That was rather a horrible moment, when