1853 HAPPIER PROSPECTS 123 



I am full of faults, but I am real and true, and the 

 whole devotion of an earnest soul cannot be over- 

 prized. 



... It is as if all that old life at Holmwood had 

 merely been a preparation for the real life of our love 

 as if we were then children ignorant of life's real purpose 

 as if these last months had merely been my old doubts 

 over again, whether I had rightly or wrongly inter- 

 preted the manner and the words that had given me 

 hope. . . . 



We will begin the new love of woman and man, no 

 longer that of boy and girl, conscious that we have aims 

 and purposes as well as affections, and that if love is 

 sweet, life is dreadfully stern and earnest. 



As time went on and no permanency offered 

 although a good deal of writing fell in his way the 

 strain told heavily upon him. In the autumn he 

 was quite out of sorts, body and mind, more at war 

 with himself than he ever was in his life before. All 

 this, he writes, had darkened his thoughts, had made 

 him once more imagine a hopeless discrepancy be- 

 tween the two of them in their ways of thinking and 

 objects in life. It was not till November 1853 that 

 this depression was banished by the trust and confi- 

 dence of her last letter. "I wish to Heaven," he 

 writes, "it had reached me six months ago. It 

 would have saved me a world of pain and error." 

 But with this, the worst period of mental suffering 

 was over, and every haunting doubt was finally 

 exorcised. His career was made possible by the 

 steady faith which neither separation nor any mis- 

 giving nor its own troubles could shake. And from 



