which
touches most hearts. For the greater part mine has been a common life,
unglorified by hazards in the field, or bright fulfilment of ambition;
it had been better for its peace if it might wholly have kept the
comfortable, usual way.

I sometimes wonder whether the printing of these pages will reveal to me
any kinsmen in affliction, for such there must be going westward alone,
and I wish that for a moment we might foregather as we pass, to compare
the marvels of our isolation. Then perhaps I might be urged to higher
effort, hearing stories more pitiful than mine, tales of silent courage
under ban of excommunion to shame me from the very thought of despair.
Poets have metaphorically given colours to souls; mine, I feel, is only
grey, the common hue of shadows; but it was steeped in gloom by a
veritable pain and evils really undergone. And as I reflect upon what I
have written, and try to imagine it read by some brisk person utterly
content with life, I can well understand that the whole thing would
appear to him incredible, too preposterously strange for belief, a
rigmarole of sick fancies beyond the power of hellebore. So be it: I
expect small comprehension and no mercy, for indeed I have written
caring little for such consequence, yielding to that human thirst for
utterance which only confession can slake; as one eases pain by a moan
though there are none to hear it. It is not altogether a grateful task.
For hardly, and then only in a fortunate hour, to one whose years and
feelings have been interwoven with his own, will even a healthy man tell
the tale of his hidden emotion; and mine is the deeper reticence of a
habit which has ever held closely to the recipe of fernseed. To entrust
a confidence to one of unproven sympathy, is to risk a profitless
embarrassment. It has been most truly said that both parties to such
impulsive avowals, whenever they afterwards meet, must feel a constraint
as of confederacy in misdemeanour.

I have hope that though I came late to the steady labour of the
vineyard, I may yet earn my wage and begin the new day with the rest.
Like Joseph Poorgrass I can now almost regard my diffidence as an
interesting study, and agree with the rustic man of calamities that
destiny might have made things even worse. Certainly the pain grows less
fierce; I can go more readily among my fellows for all but social ends.
For those who live much apart learn at last to see men not as
individuals but in grou