ste is of the nature of sin? But what then is the
meaning of the tyrannous instinct to select and to represent, to
capture beauty? Ought it to be enough to see beauty in the things
around us, in flowers and light, to hear it in the bird's song and the
falling stream--to perceive it thus gratefully and thankfully, and to
go back to our simple lives? I do not know; it is all a great mystery;
it is so hard to believe that God should put these ardent, delicious,
sweet, and solemn instincts into our spirits, simply that we may learn
our error in following them. And yet I feel with a sad certainty to-day
that I have somehow missed the way, and that God cannot or will not
help me to find it. Are we then bidden and driven to wander? Or is
there indeed some deep and perfect secret of peace and tranquillity,
which we are meant to find? Does it perhaps lie open to our eyes--as
when one searches a table over and over for some familiar object, which
all the while is there before us, plain to touch or sight?

January 3, 1889.

There is a tiny vignette of Blake's, a woodcut, I think, in which one
sees a ladder set up to the crescent moon from a bald and bare corner
of the globe. There are two figures that seem to be conversing
together; on the ladder itself, just setting his foot to the lowest
rung, is the figure of a man who is beginning to climb in a furious
hurry. "I want, I want," says the little legend beneath. The execution
is trivial enough; it is all done, and not very well done, in a space
not much bigger than a postage-stamp--but it is one of the many cases
in which Blake, by a minute symbol, expressed a large idea. One wonders
if he knew how large an idea it was. It is a symbol for me of all the
vague, eager, intense longing of the world, the desire of satisfaction,
of peace, of fulfilment, of perfection; the power that makes people
passionately religious, that makes souls so much greater and stronger
than they appear to themselves to be. It is the thought that makes us
at moments believe intensely and urgently in the justice, the mercy,
the perfect love of God, even at moments when everything round us
appears to contradict the idea. It is the outcome of that strange right
to happiness which we all feel, the instinct that makes us believe of
pain and grief that they are abnormal, and will be, must be, set right
and explained somewhere. The thought comes to me most poignantly at
sunset, when trees and chimneys stand up