periment; and if in one sense it
failed, because it did not take account of energies and elements
unused, in another sense it succeeded, because one cannot learn things
in this world by hearsay, but only by burning one's fingers in what
seemed so comfortable a flame. It was done, too, on the right lines,
with the desire not to be dependent upon diversion and stir and
business, but to approach life simply and directly, practising for the
days of loneliness and decline; and this was the error, that it tried
to mould life too much, to select from its material, to reject its
dross and debris, to rifle rather than to earn the treasure, to limit
hopes, to dip the wings of inconvenient desires.

But it is difficult, without experiment, to realise the strain of
living life too much in one mood and in one key. Neither is it the sign
of a healthy appetite to be particular about one's food. This I freely
admit. I came to see that, trained as I had been in certain habits of
life and work, habituated to certain experiences, the savour of the
interludes had owed their pungency to their economy and rarity.

And so, like some weft of opalescent mist, the sweet mirage melted in
the noonday. What I then saw I will leave to be told hereafter; but it
was not what I desired nor what I expected.

What, then, remains of the time of plenty? Not, I am thankful to say,
either vanity or vexation of spirit. It was what remains to the ruffled
bird, as he shivers in the leafless tree, in which he had sung so loud
in the high summer, embowered in greenness and rustling leafage. No
sense of the hollowness or sadness of life; but rather a quickened
knowledge of its delight and its intensity. It is the same feeling that
one has when one speeds swiftly in a train near to some place where one
lived long ago, and sees glimpses of familiar woods and roads and
houses. One knows well that others are living and working, sauntering
and dreaming, in the rooms, the gardens, the paths where one's own
energies once ran so swiftly; yet the old life seems to be there all
the time, hidden away behind the woods and walls, if one could but find
it! But I no more wish my experience away, or wish it otherwise, than I
wish I had never loved one who is gone from me, or that I had never
heard a strain of sweet music, because it has died upon the air.
Because I did not find what I was in search of, or only found a shadow
of it, I do not believe that it is not there--the whe