More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary
reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in
symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not
a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does
not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the
secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind
everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to
us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our
desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a 'month or
twain to feed on honeycomb,' but for all our years to taste no
other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving
the soul.

I remember talking once on this subject to one of the most
beautiful personalities I have ever known: a woman, whose sympathy
and noble kindness to me, both before and since the tragedy of my
imprisonment, have been beyond power and description; one who has
really assisted me, though she does not know it, to bear the burden
of my troubles more than any one else in the whole world has, and
all through the mere fact of her existence, through her being what
she is - partly an ideal and partly an influence: a suggestion of
what one might become as well as a real help towards becoming it; a
soul that renders the common air sweet, and makes what is spiritual
seem as simple and natural as sunlight or the sea: one for whom
beauty and sorrow walk hand in hand, and have the same message. On
the occasion of which I am thinking I recall distinctly how I said
to her that there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to
show that God did not love man, and that wherever there was any
sorrow, though but that of a child, in some little garden weeping
over a fault that it had or had not committed, the whole face of