hindrances like yours--only the most fearful burden of dullness and
sloth, that had crept upon me and mastered me, during all the weeks
that I had let myself be so upset and delayed. I cannot picture what
I go through when I lose my self-command in that way, but it is like
one who is tied down upon a railroad track and hears a train coming.
He gets just as desperate as he pleases, and suffers anything you
can imagine--but he does not get free. And always the book would be
hanging before me, a kind of external conscience, to show me what I
ought to have been.

Now I have gotten myself out of that, by an effort that has quite
worn me out. When I found myself at work again, I felt a kind of
savage joy of effort, a greater power than I ever knew before. In
the reckless mood that I had got to, it seemed to me that I could
keep so forever.

Now dearest, you must get the same unity in your life; you must
concentrate all your faculties upon that--get for yourself that
precious habit of being "instant in prayer", and "strenuous for the
bright reward". As Wordsworth has it, "Brook no continuance of
weak-mindedness!" Let it come to you with a pang that hurts you,
that for one minute you have been idle, that you have admitted to
yourself that life is a thing of no consequence, and that you do not
care for it. I shall have to talk to you that way--perhaps not so
often as I do to myself, because I do not think you are really in
your heart such a very dull and sodden creature as I am.

I think the greatest trial we shall have will be our fondness for
each other, and the possibility of being satisfied simply to hold
each other in our arms. But we shall get the better of that, as of