"'Insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs,' wrote Milton, as the end of his self-education—something like that I intend, if I am allowed, to give this child. I have the greatest contempt for knowledge and erudition qua knowledge and erudition. A man who has laboriously edited the Fathers seems to me only to deserve the respect due to a man who has carried through an arduous task, and one that must have been, to anyone of human feelings and real enthusiasm for ideas, uncongenial at first. Erudition touches the human race very little, but on the 'omne ignotum' principle, men are always ready to admire it, and often to pay it highly, and so there is a constant hum of these busy idlers all about the human hive. The man who works a single practical idea into ordinary people's minds, who adds his voice to the cry, 'It is better to give up than to take: it is nobler to suffer silently than to win praise: better to love than to organize,' whether it be by novel, poem, sermon, or article, has done more, far more, to leaven humanity. I long to open people's eyes to that; I learnt it late myself. Before God, if I can I will make this boy enlightened, should I live to do it; or at least not at the mercy of every vagrant prophet and bawler of conventional ideas.
"Ever your friend,
"Arthur Hamilton"
The next explains itself.
"Tredennis, September 15.
"My Dear Friend,
"As you write to inquire so affectionately about my health, I think it would be very wrong of me not to answer you fully; so I will take 'health' to mean well-being, and not confine myself to its paltry physiological usage.
"In the last month I have really turned a corner, and gained serenity and patience in my outlook. I do not mean that I am either patient or serene yet, but I have long and considerable spaces of both, when I feel content to let God make or mar me as He will, and realise that perhaps in His mind those two words may bear a precisely contrary sense.
"One thing I wish to tell you, which I am afraid you will be rather shocked to hear. I have not told you before, from a culpable reticence; for I believe that there must be either complete confidence between friends or none at all—
"Do you remember a very gloomy and depressed letter that I wrote to you the other day? When I wrote it I was deliberately contemplating an action which I have now given up: I mean a voluntary exit from this world's disappointments—suicide, in fact.
"For many years I have carried about a quietus with me. I began the habit at Cambridge. Men have often asked me what is the curious little flask with a secret fastening, that stands on my dressing-table. It is prussic acid. The morning before I wrote that letter, the impulse was so strong upon me that I determined, if matters should not shift a little, to take it on the following evening. I made, in fact, most methodical arrangements. I seemed so completely to have missed my mark. The superstitions against the practice I did not regard, as they are merely the produce of a more imaginative and anxious system of morality. I did not see why God, for His own purposes—and, what is more, I believe He does—should not remove a man by suicide, if He allows him to die by a horrible disease or relegates him to insanity. Suicide is only a symptom of a certain pitch of mental distress: its incidental result is death, but so it is of many practices not immoral.