The Altar Fire | Page 9

these are profitless thoughts, of one staring into the abyss. Somehow these bright weeks have been to me a dreary time. I am well in health; nothing ails me. It is six months since my last book was published, and I have taken a deliberate holiday; but always before, my mind, the strain of a book once taken off it, has begun to sprout and burgeon with new ideas and schemes: but now, for the first time in my life, my mind and heart remain bare and arid. I seem to have drifted into a dreary silence. It is not that things have been less beautiful, but beauty seems to have had no message, no significance for me. The people that I have seen have come and gone like ghosts and puppets. I have had no curiosity about them, their occupations and thoughts, their hopes and lives; it has not seemed worth while to be interested, in a life which appears so short, and which leads nowhere. It seems morbid to write thus, but I have not been either morbid or depressed. It has been an easy life, the life of the last few months, without effort or dissatisfaction, but without zest. It is a mental tiredness, I suppose. I have written myself out, and the cistern must fill again. Yet I have had no feeling of fatigue. It would have been almost better to have had something to bear; but I am richer than I need be, Maud and the children have been in perfect health and happiness, I have been well and strong. I shall hope that the familiar scene, the pleasant activities of home-life will bring the desire back. I realise how much the fabric of my life is built upon my writing, and write I must. Well, I have said enough; the pleasure of these entries is that one can look back to them, and see the movement of the current of life in a bygone day. I have an immense mass of arrears to make up, in the form of letters and business, but I want to survey the ground; and the survey is not a very happy one this morning; though if I made a list of my benefits and the reverse, like Robinson Crusoe, the credit side would be full of good things, and the debit side nearly empty.

September 15, 1888.
It is certainly very sweet to be at home again; to find oneself in familiar scenes, with all the pretty homely comfortable things waiting patiently for us to return--pictures, books, rooms, tree, kindly people. Wright, my excellent gardener, with whom I spent an hour strolling round the garden to-day, touched me by saying that he was glad to see me back, and that it had seemed dull without me; he has done fifty little simple things in our absence, in his tranquil and faithful way, and is pleased to have them noticed. Alec, who was with me to-day, delighted me by finding his stolid wooden horse in the summer-house, rather damp and dishevelled, and almost bursting into tears at the pathos of the neglect. "Did you think we had forgotten you?" he said as he hugged it. I suggested that he should have a good meal. "I don't think he would care about GRASS," said Alec thoughtfully, "he shall have some leaves and berries for a treat." And this was tenderly executed. Maud went off to see some of her old pensioners, and came back glowing with pleasure, with twenty pleasant stories of welcome. Two or three people came in to see me on business, and I was glad to feel I was of use. In the afternoon we all went off on a long ramble together, and we were quite surprised to see that everything seemed to be in its place as usual. Summer is over, the fields have been reaped; there is a comfortable row of stacks in the rickyard; the pleasant humming of an engine came up the valley, as it sang its homely monotone, now low, now loud. After tea--the evenings have begun to close in--I went off to my study, took out my notebook and looked over my subjects, but I could make nothing of any of them. I could see that there were some good ideas among them; but none of them took shape. Often I have found that to glance over my subjects thus, after a holiday, is like blowing soap-bubbles. The idea comes out swelling and eddying from the bowl; a globe swimming with lucent hues, reflecting dim moving shapes of rooms and figures. Not so to-day. My mind winked and flapped and rustled like a burnt-out fire; not in a depressed or melancholy way, but phlegmatically and dully. Well, the spirit bloweth as it