late-speaking
fellow creatures on their sorts of topics. It is right of me;
and yet also it is not right. I often feel that I had better be
dead than thus indifferent, contemptuous, disgusted with the
world and its roaring nonsense, which I have no thought farther
of lifting a finger to help, and only try to keep out of the way
of, and shut my door against. But the truth is, I was nearly
killed by that hideous Book on Friedrich,--twelve years in
continuous wrestle with the nightmares and the subterranean
hydras;--nearly _killed,_ and had often thought I should be
altogether, and must die leaving the monster not so much as
finished! This is one truth, not so evident to any friend or
onlooker as it is to myself: and then there is another, known to
myself alone, as it were; and of which I am best not to speak to
others, or to speak to them no farther. By the calamity of April
last, I lost my little all in this world; and have no soul left
who can make any corner of this world into a _home_ for me any
more. Bright, heroic, tender, true and noble was that lost
treasure of my heart, who faithfully accompanied me in all the
rocky ways and climbings; and I am forever poor without her.
She was snatched from me in a moment,--as by a death from the
gods. Very beautiful her death was; radiantly beautiful (to
those who understand it) had all her life been _quid plura?_ I
should be among the dullest and stupidest, if I were not among
the saddest of all men. But not a word more on all this.

All summer last, my one solacement in the form of work was
writing, and sorting of old documents and recollections;
summoning out again into clearness old scenes that had now closed
on me without return. Sad, and in a sense sacred; it was like a
kind of _worship;_ the only _devout_ time I had had for a great
while past. These things I have half or wholly the intention to
burn out of the way before I myself die:--but such continues
still mainly my employment,--so many hours every forenoon; what
I call the "work" of my day;--to me, if to no other, it is
useful; to reduce matters to writing means that you shall know
them, see them in their origins and sequences, in their essential
lineaments, considerably better than you ever did before. To set
about writing my own _Life_ would be no less than horrible to me;
and shall of a certainty never be done. The common impious
vulgar of this earth, what has it to do with my life or me?