gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled
glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is
grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is
always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no
less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that
you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is
happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow.
Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I
am writing, and in this manner writing. . . .

A week later, I am transferred here. Three more months go over and
my mother dies. No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her.
Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have
no words in which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my
father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured,
not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the
public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I
had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low by-word
among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had
given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools
that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered
then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.
My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than that I should
hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was, all
the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of
so irreparable, so irremediable, a loss. Messages of sympathy
reached me from all who had still affection for me. Even people
who had not known me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had
broken into my life, wrote to ask that some expression of their
condolence should be conveyed to me. . . .