One further gain—the greater—was that my suffering did not, I think, withdraw me wholly into myself and fence me from the world; rather it gave me a sense of the brotherhood of grief. I was one with all the agonies that lie silent in the shadow of life; and though my suffering had no tangible cause, yet I was initiated into the fellowship of those who _bear_. I _understood_;—weak, faithless, and faulty as I was, I was no longer in the complacent isolation of the strong, the successful, the selfish, and even in my darkest hour I had strength to thank God for that. 32 _Oct. 21, 1898._ I have been reading some of my old diaries to-day; and I am tempted to try and disentangle, as far as I can, the _motif_ that seems to me to underlie my simple life. One question above all others has constantly recurred to my mind; and the answer to it is the sum of my slender philosophy. The question then is this: is a simple, useful, dignified, happy life possible to most of us without the stimulus of affairs, of power, of fame? I answer unhesitatingly that such a life is possible. The tendency of the age is to measure success by publicity, not to think highly of any person or any work unless it receives “recognition,” to think it essential to happiness _monstrari digito_, to be in the swim, to be a personage. I admit at once the temptation; to such successful persons comes the consciousness of influence, the feeling of power, the anxious civilities of the undistinguished, the radiance of self-respect, the atmosphere of flattering, subtle deference, the seduction of which not even the most independent and noble characters can escape. Indeed, many an influential man of simple character and unpretending virtue, who rates such conveniences of life at their true value, and does not pursue them as an end, would be disagreeably conscious of the lack of these _petits soins_ if he adopted an unpopular cause or for any reason forfeited the influence which begets them. A friend of mine came to see me the other day fresh from a visit to a great house. His host was a man of high cabinet rank, the inheritor of an ample fortune and a historic name, who has been held by his nearest friends to cling to political life longer than prudence would warrant. My friend told me that he had been left alone one evening with his host, who had, half humorously, half seriously, indulged in a lengthy tirade against the pressure of social duties and unproductive drudgery that his high position involved. “If they would only let me alone!” he said; “I think it very hard that in the evening of my days I cannot order my life to suit my tastes. I have served the public long enough.... I would read—how I would read—and when I was bored I would sleep in my chair.” [Sidenote: SUCCESS]