July 10, 1890.
I have been sitting out, this hot, still afternoon, upon the lawn, under the shade of an old lime-tree, with its sweet scent coming and going in wafts, with the ceaseless murmur of the bees all about it; but for that slumberous sound, the place was utterly still; the sun lay warm on the old house, on the box hedges of the garden, on the rich foliage of the orchard. I have been lost in a strange dream of peace and thankfulness, only wishing the sweet hours could stay their course, and abide with me thus for ever. Part of the time Maggie sate with me, reading. We were both silent, but glad to be together; every now and then she looked up and smiled at me. I was not even visited by the sense that used to haunt me, that I must bestir myself, do something, think of something. It is not that I am less active than formerly; it is the reverse. I do a number of little things here, trifling things they would seem, not worth mentioning, mostly connected with the village or the parish. My writing has retired far into the past, like a sort of dream. I never even plan to begin again. I teach a little, not Maggie only, but some boys and girls of the place, who have left school, but are glad to be taught in the evenings. I have plenty of good easy friends here, and have the blessed sense of feeling myself wanted. Best of all, a sense of poisonous hurry seems to have gone out of my life. In the old days I was always stretching on to something, the end of my book, the next book—never content with the present, always hoping that the future would bring me the satisfaction I seemed to miss. I did not always know it at the time, for I was often happy when I was writing a book—but it was, at best, a rushing, tortured sort of happiness. My great sorrow—what has that become to me? A beautiful thing, full of patience and hope. What but that has taught me to learn to live for the moment, to take the bitter experiences of life as they come, not crushing out the sweetness and flinging the rind aside, but soberly, desirously, only eager to get from the moment what it is meant to bring. Even the very shrinking back from a bitter duty, the indolent rejection of the thought that touches one's elbow, bidding one again and again arise and go, means something; to defer one's pleasure, to break the languid dream, to take up the tiny task, what strength is there! Thus no burden seems too heavy, too awkward, too slippery, too ill-shaped, but one can lift it. The yoke is easy, because one bears it in quiet confidence, not overtaxing ability or straining hope. Instead of watching life, as from high castle windows, feeling it common and unclean, not to be mingled with, I am in it and of it. And what is become of all my old dreams of art, of the secluded worship, the lonely rapture! Well, it is all there, somehow, flowing inside life, like a stream that is added to a river, not like a leat drawn aside from the current. The force I spent on art has gone to swell life and augment it; it heightens perception, it intensifies joy—it was the fevered lust of expression that drained the vigour of my days and hours.
But am I then satisfied with the part I play? Do I feel that my faculties are being used, that I am lending a hand to the great sum of toil? I used to feel that, or thought I felt it, in the old days, but now I see that I walked in a vain delusion, serving my own joy, my own self-importance. Not that I think my old toil all ill-spent; that was my work before, as surely as it is not now; but the old intentness, the old watching for tone and gesture, for action and situation, that has all shifted its gaze, and waits upon God. It may be, nay it is certain, that I have far to go, much to learn; but now that I may perhaps recover my strength, life spreads out into sunny shallows, moving slow and clear. It is like a soft sweet interlude between two movements of fire and glow; for I see now, what then I could not see, that something in my life was burnt and shrivelled up in my enforced silence and in my bitter loss—then, when I felt my energies at their lowest, when mind and bodily frame alike flapped loose, like a flag of smut upon the bars of a grate, I was living most intensely, and the soul's wings grew fast, unfolding plume and feather. It was then that life burnt with its fiercest heat, when it withdrew me, faintly struggling, away from all that pleased and caressed the mind and the body, into the silent glow of the furnace. Strange that I should not have perceived it! But now I see in all maimed and broken lives, the lives that seem most idle and helpless, most futile and vain, that the same fierce flame is burning bright about them; that the reason why they cannot spread and flourish, like flowers, into the free air, is because the strong roots are piercing deep, entwining themselves firmly among the stones, piercing the cold silent crevices of the earth. Ay, indeed! The coal in the furnace, burning passively and hotly, is as much a force, though it but lies and suffers, as the energy that throbs in the leaping piston-rod or the rushing wheel. Not in success and noise and triumph does the soul grow; when the body rejoices, when the mind is prodigal of seed, the spirit sits within in a darkened chamber, like a folded chrysalis, stiff as a corpse, in a faint dream. But when triumphs have no savour, when the cheek grows pale and the eye darkens, then the dark chrysalis opens, and the rainbow wings begin to spread and glow, uncrumpling to the suns of paradise. My soul has taken wings, and sits poised and delicate, faint with long travail, perhaps to hover awhile about the garden blooms and the chalices of honied flowers, perhaps to take her flight beyond the glade, over the forest, to the home of her desirous heart. I know not! Yet in these sunlit hours, with the slow, strong pulse of life beating round me, it seems that something is preparing for one struck dumb and crushed with sorrow to the earth. How soft a thrill of hope throbs in the summer air! How the bird-voices in the thicket, and the rustle of burnished leaves, and the hum of insects, blend into a secret harmony, a cadence half-heard! I wait in love and confidence; and through the trees of the garden One seems ever to draw nearer, walking in the cool of the day, at whose bright coming the flowers look upwards unashamed. Shall I be bidden to meet Him! Will He call me loud or low?