gradually to the common ways of life, from the routine of business, from the routine of pleasure, from intercourse with strangers and with friends, new perplexities arose in armed hostility around me. During the years previously narrated, a secret joy in Désirée's presence, a secret confidence in final mercy, had, I now became aware, sustained me: a something further from happiness than from hope. God himself, I thought, could not now restore even that partial blessing, or give me hope or trust again. But having accepted, (whether for the best, indeed, I know not), the part of resolution, of resistance against the enervation of grief, of healthy labour, and with it, social life,-at once I fell beneath an accompanying duty of deception,-no more euphonious name would be true,-which I may justly hold one of the heaviest amongst the many unrecompensed evils of sorrow. Little, very little can the moralizing advisers, who in circumstances such as these lend with a smile the counsels of practical activity, measure the results of obedience; the tyrannous chain of custom, which follows at once the return to common life, when the Spirit, walking meanwhile alone, like that lost one of the parable, througl the leafless desert of the mind', is compelled to affect unreal interest, to act an impossible and hypocritical cheerfulness, to play a false nature. There is no escape from this: that' common gloss of theologians' is idle: we cannot be in the world, and not of the world. Thus I was now constrained to silence on the one thought perpetually recurring ; to many words, when the heart had no desire but for silence. Not the world only, but friends, the dearest and of the most sympathetic intention, ignorant by a more merciful Fate what the wide devastation of such calamity may be, were

' into which I had lapsed; for the false impression conveyed ' to companions, who were unable to conceive the strength

of those emotions which are concealed by the jests of the wretched, and by the follies of the wise'.

III Now, further, although moved perhaps by other reasons, I might partially agree with the gloomy teacher in his proclamation that life in these latter ages had passed into falsehood, an unmanly deception, a 'gibbering of apes by the Dead Sea'. Here, at least, as in the world within, I was met by perplexity. Surely something is amiss in the essence of that society, which (passing over in this place here the base pursuit of wealth or position, with graver aspects) seems to treat life as a state alternating between toil, operative only to provide means for mere existence, or puerile and fragmentary pleasures. Of the many miracles comprised in the 'world's way', none seems so wonderful as its thoughtlessness. What facile acquiescence in trivialities and delusions! what want of manly method and height of aim! what indifference, in a word, to life! How contrasted is this morbid languor of the age, characteristically satirized and inculcated at once by our great Novelist, with the force and purpose of ancient, even of mediaeval, times! Assuredly no one can fall into the madness of regretting that earlier systems cannot be restored; that honest-hearted men can believe no longer in Pope or Pagan : yet we should be permitted to admire the simple earnestness with which men in Arabia and Ionia, Rome and Athens, accepted life without compromise : prizing the present not, as modern moralists affirm in complacent falsehood, because they were without hope for the future, but simply for this, that it was the present-the

actual scene of pleasure, pain, and duty. Nothing, however, can be more opposed, perhaps even more unintelligible, to the critical and indeterminate tone of thought now dominant than that limited but consistent perfection, that practical sanity which above all things mark the schemes of ancient Ethic. By result no doubt of its transitional position, this age, like the weak-hearted Look-both-ways of the allegory, whilst assuming Earnestness as its watchword, halts between sincere acceptance of the Human or the Divine, Positivism or Spiritualism-alike sceptical without strength, and credulous without confidence.

IV In the false calm of despair, such considerations pressed on me with augmented force. Everywhere I saw the thoughtless and the good blinded alike by wilfulness to the travail of creation, the world's wrong, the vast preponderating Evil which the creed on their lips asserted was man's inalienable burden: for personal justification denying these things altogether, or compromising for a moment's confession by immediate recourse to some consolatory sophist saying, enthroning as Faith what is facility of forgetfulness. Si vous ne vous souciez guère de savoir la ' vérité,' observes one whose words I am glad to substitute for mine, after noticing the superficial philosophy of life accepted by his contemporaries, ' en voilà assez pour vous 'laisser en repos. Mais si vous désirez de tout votre

...

cœur de la connaître, ce n'est pas assez, regardez au détail; c'en cerait assez pour une question de philosophie; mais ici où il va de tout. . .. Et cependant, après une réflexion légère de cette sorte, on s'amusera, etc.'. . . Through natural, perhaps faulty, frame of mind it was, not through any morbid distraction of sorrow, that I found

it impossible to lay aside the pressure of conviction thus lightly. The philosopher can write, We will survey mankind and the globe they inhabit with serenity, as he sets forth the scheme of his Kosmos: but no question, if we consider it truly, is so terrible and so imperative, when it has once arisen, as that, How the world came to be this astonishing scene of conflict, this battle-field of the demons and the angels? Such considerations, I may add, are neither wise or unwise, idle or necessary; the innate bias of some minds, and mine, I suppose, was such, renders them simply inevitable. They who would account for by calling them 'morbid ', may be reminded that epithets are not reasons: they who fancy there is pride or pleasure in recording, have never felt them. In this form the 'riddle of existence tormented me now often in solitary hours, when I dared no longer think on Désirée, with a force the more fearful because these thoughts were caused or attended by a great calm of mind, a sad lucidity. It was to the maniac of the prison island between Zuecca and Lido that Shelley ascribed the awful fate to be

as a nerve o'er which do creep

The else-unfelt oppressions of the earth:

but there were spaces of set sobriety during which I shared it by reflection on the records of history, or the reported news of the day, on what I had myself seen, and on what I had not seen.

V Here, too, I am aware, human invention is ready with appropriate anodynes: the saint and the worldly, Goethe and Arnold, will say, ' man is not sent to solve the problem,

but to act it. Turn to practical activity: dig, colonize,