so young and sensible inside the crazy machine. If we knew that it was
all going to help us somewhere, sometime, no matter how far off, to be
strong and cheerful and brave and kind, how easy to bear it all!

But in spite of everything, how one enjoys it all; how interesting and
absorbing it all is! Wherever one turns, there are delicious things to
see, from the aconite with its yellow head and its green collar in the
bare shrubbery, to the streak of sunshine on the plain with the great
rays thrust downwards from the hidden sun, making the world an
enchanted place. And all the curious, fantastic, charming people that
one meets, from the boy sitting on the cart-shaft, with all sorts of
old love-histories hinted in his clear skin and large eye, to the
wizened labourer in his quaint-cut, frowzy clothes, bill-hook in hand,
a symbol of the patient work of the world. So helpless a crowd, so
patient in trouble, so bewildered as to the meaning of it all; and
zigzagged all across it, in nations, in families, in individuals, the
jagged lines of evil, so devastating, so horrible, so irremediable; and
even worse than evil--which has at least something lurid and fiery
about it--the dark, slimy streaks of meanness and jealousy, of boredom
and ugliness, which seem to have no use at all but to make things move
heavily and obscurely, when they might run swift and bright.

So here in my isle of silence, between fen and fen, under the spacious
sky, I want to try an experiment--to live simply and honestly, without
indolence or haste, neither wasting time nor devouring it, not refusing
due burdens but not inventing useless ones, not secluding myself in a
secret cell of solitude, but not multiplying dull and futile relations.
One thing I may say honestly and sincerely, that I do indeed desire to
fulfil the Will and purpose of God for me, if I can but discern it; for
that there is a great will at work behind it all, I cannot for a moment