I thought when I penned the last paragraph that I had made an end of telling you of my love of life and of the things of it, but that half-line which I have quoted from Rossetti's most beautiful sonnet sets me thinking of another love of which I have not yet spoken. Need I say that I mean the love of music? not only of the music which is "like soft hands stealing into ours in the dark, and holding us fast without a spoken word," but also of those sobbing soaring strains, which sound as sadly in our ears as does the wintry flittering of dead leaves upon a withered bough? To those who feel that every ray of morning sunlight which strikes across their path calls them to a higher and holier living; to whose hearts the pure petals of a primrose are as a silent reproach against their own impurity; to whom a glint of blue sky, gleaming out between rain-beaten tree-tops is as an aspiration towards a loftier, lovelier life; to whom the very wind, as it sings from the gates of morning, cries out "Unclean! unclean!"--to such, I suppose, music must ever contain less of joy than of sadness, if, indeed, it appeal not with a pleasure which cuts to the heart like a pain. It is to them as if an angel from heaven had cast, for one passing second, upon a cloud-screen drawn across the soul, a vision of what they _might_ be, of what they were _meant_ to be, and of what in God's good time they may yet become; and as if at the very moment when the spirit was pouring itself forth in one unutterable cry of longing after the Divine beauty of that ideal, there rose before them the shadow-horror of what they really are. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Then why print it here? asks the reader. For the reason, I reply, that this Diary is the history, not only of a sin, but of a soul; and that to leave the aspect of my subject here treated unnoticed would be to give but a maimed and one-sided representation. I do not think any reader who studies my sketch-outline as a whole will consider the introduction of this chapter as inartistic.] [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER IV. _I DIE._ I pass on now to tell of my death moments. The room in which I died was the room in which I had been born. One half of it was my bedroom, and the other half--that near the window--was my study. There I had done all my work, and there were my books and papers. There, too, grouped around the walls, were portraits of the men and women who seem to me sometimes to be more myself, as Emerson puts it, than even I am, and who are nearer to me and dearer to me, many of them, than are some of those who sit daily with me in the household--I mean the portraits of my favourite writers.