er writing the last words, and the conviction came upon me that
it was the end. There was more to be told; the story stretched on into
the distance; but it was as though the frame of the picture had
suddenly fallen upon the canvas, and I knew that just so much and no
more was to be seen. And then, as though to show me plainly that the
work was over, the next day came an event which drew my mind off the
book. I had had a period of unclouded health and leisure, everything
had combined to help me, and then this event, of which I need not
speak, came and closed the book at the right moment.

What wonder if one grows fatalistic about writing; that one feels that
one can only say what is given one to say! And now, dry and arid as my
mind is, I would give all I have for a renewal of that beautiful glow,
which I cannot recover. It is misery--I can conceive no greater--to be
bound hand and foot in this helpless silence.

November 6, 1888.

It is a joy to think of the way in which the best, most beautiful, most
permanent things have stolen unnoticed into life. I like to think of
Wordsworth, an obscure, poor, perverse, absurd man, living in the
corner of the great house at Alfoxden, walking in the moonlight with
Coleridge, living on milk and eggs, utterly unaccountable and puerile
to the sensible man of affairs, while the two planned the Lyrical
Ballads. I like to think of Keats, sitting lazily and discontentedly in
the villa garden at Hampstead, with his illness growing upon him and
his money melting away, scribbling the "Ode to the Nightingale," and
caring so little about the fate of it that it was only by chance, as it
were, that the pencil scraps were rescued from the book where he had
shut them. I love to think of Charlotte Bronte, in the bare kitchen of
the little house in the grey, wind-swept village on the edge of the
moorland, penning, in sickness and depression, the scenes of Jane Eyre,
without a thought that she was doing anything unusual or lasting. We
surround such scenes with a heavenly halo, born of the afterglow of
fame; we think them romantic, beautiful, thrilled and flushed by
passionate joy; but there was little that was delightful about them at
the time.

The most beautiful of all such scenes is the tale of the maiden-wife in
the stable at Bethlehem, with the pain and horror and shame of the
tragic experience, in all its squalid publicity, told in those simple
words, which I never hear without a smile t