humility than it is for me, who begin the day by going down on my
knees and washing the floor of my cell. For prison life with its
endless privations and restrictions makes one rebellious. The most
terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart - hearts
are made to be broken - but that it turns one's heart to stone.
One sometimes feels that it is only with a front of brass and a lip
of scorn that one can get through the day at all. And he who is in
a state of rebellion cannot receive grace, to use the phrase of
which the Church is so fond - so rightly fond, I dare say - for in
life as in art the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the
soul, and shuts out the airs of heaven. Yet I must learn these
lessons here, if I am to learn them anywhere, and must be filled
with joy if my feet are on the right road and my face set towards
'the gate which is called beautiful,' though I may fall many times
in the mire and often in the mist go astray.

This New Life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call
it, is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by
means of development, and evolution, of my former life. I remember
when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were
strolling round Magdalen's narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in
the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit
of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going
out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I
went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined
myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit
side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and
its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering,
tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse
that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-