As I am now setting down, without much order or connection, the lessons which I had to learn, I may perhaps be excused if I add one or two others. I can say of them all, that they are not book lessons. They have been taught me by my own experience, and as a rule I have always found that in my own most special perplexities I got but little help from books or other persons. I had to find out for myself what was for me the proper way of dealing with them. My love for Ellen was great, but I discovered that even such love as this could not be left to itself. It wanted perpetual cherishing. The lamp, if it was to burn brightly, required daily trimming, for people became estranged and indifferent, not so much by open quarrel or serious difference, as by the intervention of trifles which need but the smallest, although continuous effort for their removal. The true wisdom is to waste no time over them, but to eject them at once. Love, too, requires that the two persons who love one another shall constantly present to one another what is best in them, and to accomplish this, deliberate purpose, and even struggle, are necessary. If through relapse into idleness we do not attempt to bring soul and heart into active communion day by day, what wonder if this once exalted relationship become vulgar and mean? I was much overworked. It was not the work itself which was such a trial, but the time it consumed. At best, I had but a clear space of an hour, or an hour and a half at home, and to slave merely for this seemed such a mockery! Day after day sped swiftly by, made up of nothing but this infernal drudgery, and I said to myself—Is this life? But I made up my mind that _never would I give myself tongue_. I clapped a muzzle on my mouth. Had I followed my own natural bent, I should have become expressive about what I had to endure, but I found that expression reacts on him who expresses and intensifies what is expressed. If we break out into rhetoric over a toothache, the pangs are not the easier, but the worse to be borne.