am
like the monkey of whom Frank Buckland wrote, who got into the kettle
when the water was lukewarm, and found the outer air so cold whenever
he attempted to leave it, that he was eventually very nearly boiled
alive. The fact that my occupation is gone leaves life hollow to the
core. Perhaps a wise man would content himself with composing some
placid literary essays, selecting some lesser figure in the world of
letters, collecting gossip, and what are called "side-lights," about
him, visiting his birthplace and early haunts, criticising his
writings. That would be a harmless way of filling the time. But any one
who has ever tried creative work gets filled with a nauseating disgust
for making books out of other people's writings, and constructing a
kind of resurrection-pie out of the shreds. Moreover I know nothing
except literature; I could only write a literary biography; and it has
always seemed to me a painful irony that men who have put into their
writings what other people put into deeds and acts should be the very
people whose lives are sedulously written and rewritten, generation
after generation. The instinct is natural enough. The vivid memories of
statesmen and generals fade; but as long as we have the fascinating and
adorable reveries of great spirits, we are consumed with a desire to
reconstruct their surroundings, that we may learn where they found
their inspiration. A great poet, a great imaginative writer, so
glorifies and irradiates the scene in which his mighty thoughts came to
him, that we cannot help fancying that the secret lies in crag and hill
and lake, rather than in the mind that gathered in the common joy. I
have a passion for visiting the haunts of genius, but rather because
they teach me that inspiration lies everywhere, if we can but perceive
it, than because I hope to detect where the particular charm lay. And
so I am driven back upon my own poor imagination. I say to myself, like
Samson, "I will go out as at other times before, and shake myself," and
then the end of the verse falls on me like a shadow--"and he wist not
that the Lord was departed from him."

January 18, 1889.

Nothing the matter, and yet everything the matter! I plough on drearily
enough, like a vessel forging slowly ahead against a strong, ugly,
muddy stream. I seem to gain nothing, neither hope, patience, nor
strength. My spirit revolted at first, but now I have lost the heart
even for that: I simply bear my burden