rt. I suppose
it's nerves or pride or something; but I am unhappy about it. I am going
to drown my sorrows in _Consuelo_ and burn some incense in my pipe to
the god of Contentment and Forgetfulness.

I do not know, but I hope, if I can only get better, I shall be a help
to you soon in every way and no more a trouble and burthen. All my
difficulties about life have so cleared away; the scales have fallen
from my eyes, and the broad road of my duty lies out straight before me
without cross or hindrance. I have given up all hope, all fancy rather,
of making literature my hold: I see that I have not capacity enough. My
life shall be, if I can make it, my only business. I am desirous to
practise now, rather than to preach, for I know that I should ever
preach badly, and men can more easily forgive faulty practice than dull
sermons. If Colvin does not think that I shall be able to support myself
soon by literature, I shall give it up and go (horrible as the thought
is to me) into an office of some sort: the first and main question is,
that I must live by my own hands; after that come the others.

You will not regard me as a madman, I am sure. It is a very rational
aberration at least to try to put your beliefs into practice. Strangely
enough, it has taken me a long time to see this distinctly with regard
to my whole creed; but I have seen it at last, praised be my sickness
and my leisure! I have seen it at last; the sun of my duty has risen; I
have enlisted for the first time, and after long coquetting with the
shilling, under the banner of the Holy Ghost![10]

8.15.--If you had seen the moon last night! It was like transfigured
sunshine; as clear and mellow, only showing everything in a new
wonderful significance. The shadows of the leaves on the road were so
strangely black that Dowson and I had difficulty in believing that they
were not solid, or at least pools of dark mire. And the hills and the
trees, and the white Italian houses with lit windows! O! nothing could
bring home to you the keenness and the reality and the wonderful
_Unheimlichkeit_ of all these. When the moon rises every night over the
Italian coast, it makes a long path over the sea as yellow as gold.

How I happened to be out in the moonlight yesterday, was that Dowson and
I spent the evening with an odd man called Bates, who played Italian
music to us with great feeling; all which was quite a dissipation in my
still existence.

_Friday._--I cannot en