in and again, deepening into a despairing purpose; the
fertile mind built up rapidly a dreadful vista of possibilities,
terrible facts that might have to be faced. Even so the dark mood
beckoned me again; better to end it, said a hollow voice, better to let
your dear ones suffer the worst, with a sorrow that will lessen year by
year, than sink into a broken shadowed life of separation and
restraint--but again it passed; again a grim resolution came to my aid.

Then, as we sped homewards in the speeding train, there came over me
another thought. Here was I, who had lightly trafficked with human
emotions, who had written with a romantic glow of the dark things of
life, despair, agony, thoughts of self-destruction, insane fears, here
was I at last confronted with them. I could never dare, I felt, to
speak of such things again; were such dark mysteries to be used to
heighten the sense of security and joy, to give a trivial reader a
thrill of pleasure, a sympathetic reader a thrill of luxurious emotion?
No, there was nothing uplifting or romantic about them when they came;
they were dark as the grave, cold as the underlying clay. What a vile
and loathsome profanation, deserving indeed of a grim punishment, to
make a picturesque background out of such things! At length I had had
my bitter taste of grief, and drew in to my trembling spirit the
shuddering chill of despair. I had stepped, like the light-hearted
maiden of the old story, within the forbidden door, and the ugly, the
ghastly reality of the place had burst upon me, the huddled bodies, the
basin filled with blood. One had read in books of men and women whose
life had been suddenly curdled into slow miseries. One had half blamed
them in one's thought; one had felt that any experience, however dark
and deep, must have its artistic value; and one had thought that they
should have emerged with new zest into life. I understood it now, how
life could be frozen at its very source, how one could cry out with Job
curses on the day that gave one birth, and how gladly one would turn
one's face away from the world and all its cheerful noise, awaiting the
last stroke of God.

February 20, 1889.

There is a story of a Cornish farmer who, returning home one dark and
misty night, struck across the moorland, every yard of which he knew,
in order to avoid a long tramp by road. In one place there were a
number of disused mine-shafts; the railing which had once protected
them had