To sit in my warm room and look out at the driving snowstorm, is like going back in thought to the hurly-burly of the great world.
Nine weeks have passed already.
I still have a dull, heavy feeling, as if I had been struck in the head with a hammer. I merely exist, but it seems as if life were again dawning upon me. When I awake in the mornings, I am obliged to ask myself who and where I am, and to recall all my woe. But then work soon summons me away.
I have nothing more to look for, be it from the outer world, or the morrow. I am forced back upon myself and the present. For me, there are neither letters nor books, and the very roads are closed. To arise in the morning and know that no tidings, whether of joy or sadness, can come from without; to have nothing to fall back upon but one's self and the undying laws of nature: he who can lead such a life, self-contained and yet contented, must be like the child illuminated by its own radiance--the child painted by Correggio.
Hammer and axe, file and saw, all that once seemed to me instruments of torture for poor enslaved humanity, I have found the instruments of deliverance. They banish the demons that dwell within us. Where these tools are wielded by industrious hands, evil spirits cannot tarry. The redeemer who will consecrate labor, is yet to come.
At last, I find myself obliged to be content without doing anything in the way of art.
Although wood is useful, and in many respects indispensable, it cannot be applied to serve beauty apart from usefulness. The substance with which my art, or rather trade, employs itself, is unequal to the demands of art, except for decorative purposes. Bronze and marble speak a universal language, but a wooden image always retains a provincial character. It addresses us in dialect, as it were, and never attains to the perfect expression of the ideal. We can make wooden effigies of animals or plants with which we are familiar, and can even carve angels in relievo, but to make a life-size bust, or human figure, of wood, were entirely out of the question.