complain, even to myself.

I came back at sundown, through the silent garden, all shrouded and
muffled with snow. The snow lay on the house, outlining the cornices,
cresting the roof-tiles, crusted sharply on the cupola, whitening the
tall chimney-stacks. The comfortable smoke went up into the still air,
and the firelight darted in the rooms. What a sense of beautiful
permanence, sweet hopefulness, fireside warmth it all gave; and it is
real as well. No life that I could have devised is so rich in love and
tranquillity as mine; everything to give me content, except the
contented mind. Why cannot I enter, seat myself in the warm firelight,
open a book, and let the old beautiful thoughts flow into my mind, till
the voices of wife and children return to gladden me, and I listen to
all that they have seen and done? Why should I rather sit, like a
disconsolate child among its bricks, feebly and sadly planning new
combinations and fantastic designs? I have done as much and more than
most of my contemporaries; what is this insensate hunger of the spirit
that urges me to work that I cannot do, for rewards that I do not want?
Why cannot I be content to dream and drowse a little?

"Rest, then, and rest
And think of the best,
'Twixt summer and spring,
When no birds sing."

That is what I desire to do, and cannot. It is as though some creeper
that had enfolded and enringed a house with its tendrils, creeping
under window-ledges and across mellow brickwork, had been suddenly cut
off at the root, and hung faded and lustreless, not even daring to be
torn away. Yet I am alive and well, my mind is alert and vigorous, I
have no cares or anxieties, except that my heart seems hollow at the
core.

January 12, 1889.

I have had a very bad time of late. It seems futile to say anything
about it, and the plain man would rub his eyes, and wonder where the
misery lay. I have been perfectly well, and everything has gone
smoothly; but I cannot write. I have begun half-a-dozen books. I have
searched my notes through and through. I have sketched plots, written
scenes. I cannot go on with any of them. I have torn up chapters with
fierce disgust, or have laid them quietly aside. There is no vitality
in them. If I read them aloud to any one, he would wonder what was
wrong--they are as well written as my other books, as amusing, as
interesting. But it is all without energy or invention, it is all worse
than my best. The peo