r to get over this
feeling because of all the book would mean to the world. After this
talk she got out the manuscript and laid it on Gilbert's desk. He
read what he had written and immediately set about dictating the rest
of the book.

Early in 1936 he told a group of friends that the book was finished.
One of them said "Nunc dimittis" and Edward Macdonald, who was
present, commented: "The words were chilling, though he seemed to be
in fairly good health. But certainly he was tired. . . ."

The book showed no sign of fatigue. High-spirited and intensely
amusing, it seemed to promise many more--for into almost old age he
had carried the imagination and energy in which as a very young man
we saw his resemblance to the youthful Dickens.

Reviewing his life with the thread of thanksgiving that had been his
clue throughout, he looked back on it as "indefensibly happy" and it
was in truth a rich and full human existence. Yet Father Vincent, who
knew him intimately, speaks of him in these last years as heartbroken
by public events, as suffering with the pains of creation. "He was
crucified to his thought. Like St. Thomas he was never away from his
thought. A fellow friar had to care for Thomas, to feed him 'sicut
nutrix' because of his absorption in his thought." Thus Father
Vincent saw Frances cherishing Gilbert both mind and body.

A friend, protesting vehemently against the phrase "crucified to his
thought" says, "It was his life-long beatitude to observe and ponder
and conclude."

Of his own so-called paradoxes Gilbert was wont to maintain that it
was God not he, who made them, and here we have surely one of the
paradoxes of human life. Intense vitality, joy in living, vigor of
creative thought bring to their owners immense happiness _and_ acute
suffering.

Is it not a part of the most fundamental of all antinomies--the
greatness and the littleness of man? Created for eternity and
prisoned in time, we have no perfect joy in this world, and the
reaching upward and outward of the mind is at once the keenest joy
and the fiercest pain--rather as we talk of growing pains. Only
Gilbert loved to grow so much that he would not think of the pain.
"You must never pity me," he said to Lady Fisher, and all through his
life he was saying and meaning "You must never pity me."

But while he was writing the _Autobiography_ and giving thanks for
his life, its last months were shadowed by trials especially heavy
for a man of his