o learn the Greek grammar, as I wanted to do. 'I shall die before I get
to the syntax,' I thought at the first page--and threw the book under
the table. It is there still, for I forbade anyone to pick it up.

"If this 'Explanation' gets into anybody's hands, and they have patience
to read it through, they may consider me a madman, or a schoolboy, or,
more likely, a man condemned to die, who thought it only natural to
conclude that all men, excepting himself, esteem life far too lightly,
live it far too carelessly and lazily, and are, therefore, one and all,
unworthy of it. Well, I affirm that my reader is wrong again, for my
convictions have nothing to do with my sentence of death. Ask them, ask
any one of them, or all of them, what they mean by happiness! Oh, you
may be perfectly sure that if Columbus was happy, it was not after he
had discovered America, but when he was discovering it! You may be quite
sure that he reached the culminating point of his happiness three days
before he saw the New World with his actual eyes, when his mutinous
sailors wanted to tack about, and return to Europe! What did the New
World matter after all? Columbus had hardly seen it when he died, and
in reality he was entirely ignorant of what he had discovered. The
important thing is life--life and nothing else! What is any 'discovery'
whatever compared with the incessant, eternal discovery of life?

"But what is the use of talking? I'm afraid all this is so commonplace
that my confession will be taken for a schoolboy exercise--the work of
some ambitious lad writing in the hope of his work 'seeing the light';
or perhaps my readers will say that 'I had perhaps something to say, but
did not know how to express it.'

"Let me add to this that in every idea emanating from genius, or even in
every serious human idea--born in the human brain--there always remains
something--some sediment--which cannot be expressed to others, though
one wrote volumes and lectured upon it for five-and-thirty years. There
is always a something, a remnant, which will never come out from your
brain, but will remain there with you, and you alone, for ever and ever,
and you will die, perhaps, without having imparted what may be the very
essence of your idea to a single living soul.

"So that if I cannot now impart all that has tormented me for the last
six months, at all events you will understand that, having reached my
'last convictions,' I must have paid a very dear p