And still, as I go in and out, the death of Alec seems the one absolutely unintelligible and inexplicable thing, a gloom penetrated by no star. It was the one thing that might have made me unselfish, tender-hearted, the anxious care of some other than myself. "Perhaps," says an old friend writing to me with a clumsy attempt at comfort, "perhaps he was taken mercifully away from some evil to come." A good many people say that, and feel it quite honestly. But what an insupportable idea of the ways of Providence, that God had planned a prospect for the child so dreadful that even his swift removal should be tolerable by comparison! What a helpless, hopeless confession of failure! No; either the whole short life, closed by the premature death, must have been designed, planned, executed deliberately; or else God is at the mercy of blank cross-currents, opposing forces, tendencies even stronger than Himself; and then the very idea of God crumbles away, and God becomes the blank and inscrutable force working behind a gentle, good-humoured will, which would be kind and gracious if it could, but is trammelled and bound by something stronger; that was the Greek view, of course--God above man, and Fate above God. The worst of it is that it has a horrible vraisemblance, and seems to lie even nearer to the facts of life than our own tender-hearted and sentimental theories and schemes of religion. But whether it be God or fate, the burden has to be borne. And my one endeavour must be to bear it myself, consciously and courageously, and to shift it so far as I can from the gentler and tenderer shoulders of those whose life is so strangely linked with mine. May 25, 1890. One sees a house, like the house we now live in, from a road as one passes, from the windows of a train. It seems to be set at the end of the world, with the earth's sunset distance behind it--it seems a fortress of quiet, a place of infinite peace; and then one lives in it, and behold, it is a centre of a little active life, with all sorts of cross-currents darting to and fro, over it, past it. Or again one thinks, as one sees such a house in passing, that there at least one could live in meditation and cloistered calm; that there would be neither cares nor anxieties; that one would be content to sit, just looking out at the quiet fields, pacing to and fro, receiving impressions, musing, selecting, apprehending--and then one lives there, and the stream of life is as turbid, as fretful as ever. The strange thing is that such delusions survive any amount of experience; that one cannot read into other lives the things that trouble one's own.