intimate to use. The diaries shed a flood of light on Tolstoy's ideas,
motives, and manner of life, and have modified some of my opinions,
explaining many hitherto obscure points, while they have also enhanced
my admiration for the man. They not only touch on many delicate
subjects--on his relations to his wife and family--but they also give
the true reasons for leaving his home at last, and explain why he did
not do so before. The time, it seems to me, is not ripe for disclosures
of this nature, which so closely concern the living.

Despite a strong rein of restraint his mental distress permeates the
touching letter of farewell which he wrote some sixteen years before his
death. He, however, shrank from acting upon it, being unable to satisfy
himself that it was a right step. This letter has already appeared in
foreign publications,* but it is quoted here because "I have suffered
long, dear Sophie, from the discord between my life and my beliefs.

* And in Birukov's short Life of Tolstoy, 1911. of the
light which it throws on the character and disposition of
the writer, the workings of his mind being of greater moment
to us than those impulsive actions by which he was too often
judged.

"I cannot constrain you to alter your life or your accustomed ways.
Neither have I had the strength to leave you ere this, for I thought
my absence might deprive the little ones, still so young, of whatever
influence I may have over them, and above all that I should grieve
you. But I can no longer live as I have lived these last sixteen years,
sometimes battling with you and irritating you, sometimes myself giving
way to the influences and seductions to which I am accustomed and which
surround me. I have now resolved to do what I have long desired: to go