slight return, I know, but it is the one, I feel certain, that
pleases them most. I saw R- for an hour on Saturday week, and I
tried to give the fullest possible expression of the delight I
really felt at our meeting. And that, in the views and ideas I am
here shaping for myself, I am quite right is shown to me by the
fact that now for the first time since my imprisonment I have a
real desire for life.

There is before me so much to do, that I would regard it as a
terrible tragedy if I died before I was allowed to complete at any
rate a little of it. I see new developments in art and life, each
one of which is a fresh mode of perfection. I long to live so that
I can explore what is no less than a new world to me. Do you want
to know what this new world is? I think you can guess what it is.
It is the world in which I have been living. Sorrow, then, and all
that it teaches one, is my new world.

I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and
sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as
far as possible: to treat them, that is to say, as modes of
imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had
no place in my philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a whole,
used often to quote to me Goethe's lines - written by Carlyle in a
book he had given her years ago, and translated by him, I fancy,
also:-


'Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for the morrow, -