With the dog for a walk around Windy Ash. It was a beautiful winter's morning—a low sun giving out a pale light but no warmth—a luminant, not a fire—the hedgerows bare and well trimmed, an Elm lopped close showing white stumps which glistened liquidly in the sun, a Curlew whistling overhead, a deeply cut lane washed hard and clean by the winter rains, a gunshot from a distant cover, a creeping Wren, silent and tame, in a bramble bush, and over the five-barred gate the granite roller with vacant shafts. I leaned on the gate and saw the great whisps of cloud in the sky like comets' tails. Everything cold, crystalline.
[1] He had spoken about me to the Museum authorities, and it was his influence which got me the nomination to sit for the examination.
[2] In Byron's poem.
1911
January 2.
As a young man—a very young man—my purpose was to plough up all obstacles, brook no delays, and without let or hindrance win through to an almost immediate success! But witness 1910! "My career" so far has been like the White Knight's, who fell off behind when the horse started, in front when it stopped, and sideways occasionally to vary the monotony.
January 30.
Feeling ill and suffering from attacks of faintness. My ill health has produced a change in my attitude towards work. As soon as I begin to feel the least bit down, I am bound to stop at once as the idea of bending over a desk or a dissecting dish, of reading or studying, nauseates me when I think that perhaps to-morrow or next day or next week, next month, next year I may be dead. What a waste of life it seems to work! Zoology is repugnant and philosophy superfluous beside the bliss of sheer living—out in the cold polar air or indoors in a chair before a roaring fire with hands clasped, watching the bustling, soothing activity of the flames.
Then, as soon as I am well again, I forget all this, grow discontented with doing nothing and work like a Tiger.