Other thoughts were set down in the same year:
“The man who is discontented with this world is like a blackbird who desires to be a plover that calls by night in the wandering sky.
“To have loved truly, be it for an hour only, is to be sure of eternity. Love is eternity. And if we have not loved, then also we are destined to eternity in order that in some other condition we may yet love.
“If only we did not know that in this world it is often well to attempt what it would not be well to achieve.
“Preach extravagance and extremes and ideals that haply we may achieve something above mediocrity. If we preach compromise we may not achieve more than desolation. And yet even out of desolation may bloom the rose.
“Exactly the same proportion of marriages as of illicit unions are immoral, even in a worldly sense.”
In 1899 it must have been the death of a child that dictated the words:—
“I do not shed tears: I did that when she was born, for I saw her lie dead in the cot where she smiled.”
There was a long interval and then one short entry:—
“I possess everything, but in the world’s sense nothing but my name—A. A. B.; if I could lose that I should be a better citizen, not of the world, but of the universe of eternity. Are the stars called Procion and Lyra except by astronomers? Then why should I have a name?—unless, indeed, there were a name which described me as a poem describes an emotion. I will be nameless. I will no longer condemn myself to this title of A. A. B.”