stless
or unconcerned. I blessed the kindly fate that had guided me to him, and
had won for me his deep regard. I did not wish to copy or imitate him--he
had infected me with a deep distrust for dependence--I only wished to live
my own life in the same eager spirit. As he had said to me once, the motto
for every man was to be _Amor Fati_--not a reluctant acquiescence, or
a feeble optimism, or a gentle resignation, but a passion for one's own
destiny, a deep desire to make the most and the best out of life, and a
strong purpose to share one's best with all who were journeying at one's
side.

So the night passed, thick with recollections and regrets, deepening into a
horror of loss and darkness, and then slowly brightening into the calm
prelude of a day of farewell. The birds began to chirp and twitter in the
ivy; the thrush uttered her long-drawn notes, sweetly repeated and
sustained in the dusky bushes. That sound was much connected in my mind
with Aveley. To be awakened thus in the summer dawn, to listen awhile to
the delicious sound, to fall asleep again with the thought of the long
pleasant day of work and friendship ahead of me, had been one of my
greatest luxuries.

I rose early, and made my last preparations, and then, having got a little
time before the last meal I was to take with Barthrop, I went round about
the garden with a desire to draw into my spirit for the last time the pure
and happy atmosphere of the place.

I saw the beds fringed with purple polyanthus, and the daffodils in the
dewy grass. I gazed at the long lines of the low hills across the stream,
with the woodland spaces all flushed with spring. I heard the cawing of the
rooks in the soft air, and the bubbling song of the chaffinches filled the
shrubberies.

I knew the mood of old--the mood in which, after a holiday sojourn in some
place which one has learned to love, a happy space of time stained by no
base anxiety, shadowed by no calamity, the call to rejoin the routine of
life makes itself heard half reluctantly, half ardently. The heart at such
moments tries to be grateful without regret, and hopeful without
indifference. The purpose to go, the desire to stay, wrestle together; and
now at the end of the happiest and most fruitful period I had ever known or
was ever, I thought, likely to know, I felt like Jacob wrestling with the
angel till the breaking of the day, and crying out, half in weakness, half
in strength, "I will not let thee go