in clay, Wordsworth liked long walks, Byron had enough to do to keep himself thin, Tennyson had his pipe, Morris made tapestry at a loom.  Southey had no amusements, and he died of softening of the brain.  The happy people are those who have work which they love, and a hobby of a totally different kind which they love even better.  But I doubt whether one can make a hobby for oneself in middle age, unless one is a very resolute person indeed.

February 7, 1889.

The children went off yesterday to spend the inside of the day with a parson hard by, who has three children of his own, about the same age.  They did not want to go, of course, and it was particularly terrible to them, because neither I nor their mother were to go with them.  But I was anxious they should go:  there is nothing better for children than occasionally to visit a strange house, and to go by themselves without an elder person to depend upon.  It gives them independence and gets rid of shyness.  They end by enjoying themselves immensely, and perhaps making some romantic friendship.  As a child, I was almost tearfully insistent that I should not have to go on such visits; but yet a few days of the sort stand out in my childhood with a vividness and a distinctness, which show what an effect they produced, and how they quickened one’s perceptive and inventive faculties.

When they were gone I went out with Maud.  I was at my very worst, I fear; full of heaviness and deeply disquieted; desiring I knew well what—­some quickening of emotion, some hopeful impulse—­but utterly unable to attain it.  We had a very sad talk.  I tried to make it clear to her how desolate I felt, and to win some kind of forgiveness for my sterile and loveless mood.  She tried to comfort me; she said that it was only like passing through a tunnel; she made it clear to me, by some unspoken communication, that I was dearer than ever to her in these days of sorrow; but there was a shadow in her mind, the shadow that fell from the loneliness in which I moved, the sense that she could not share my misery with me.  I tried to show her that the one thing one could not share was emptiness.  If one’s cup is full of interests, plans, happinesses, even tangible anxieties, it is easy and natural to make them known to one whom one loves best.  But one cannot share the horror of the formless dark; the vacuous and tortured mind.  It is the dark absence of anything that is the source of my wretchedness.  If there were pain, grief, mournful energy of any kind, one could put it into words; but how can one find expression for what is a total eclipse?