My vision, my life, my joy, my fire! These are the things that are dying! And when the soul is dead do you think that I shall care about the body? Do you think that I will stay in this world a shell, a mockery, a corpse? Stay either to putrefy with pleasure or to be embalmed in dulness? Nay, you do not know me! * * * * * --I said to myself to-night, “If I perish in this world it will be because I was too far ahead of my environment--that and that only. It will be because I was pure, single-hearted, consecrated, and because of such you neither know nor care.” Do I fear to say that? I am done with shame--I think that I am dying--let me speak the truth. * * * * * --And I have really said the word then--the word that can not be recalled--that my hope is dead, that I give up--that I can not live my life? Nay--I do not have to say the word, the word says itself. * * * * * March 6th. To-day I shook myself together. I could not stand such wretchedness. I said, I will get a novel, and I will put myself into it--grimly--I will read in spite of everything. * * * * * And such a book as I lighted on by chance!--Once I had whole yawning vistas of books toward which I stretched out my arms; but somehow I had forgotten them all to-day. I could do no better than pick up a book by chance.-- I picked up Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and I found myself in the midst of the same misery that haunts me here. I read it, but it did not help me. * * * * * --It is strange what poverty has ground into my soul. I find myself reading such a book with but one feeling, one idea crying out in me. I discover that my whole being is reduced to the great elemental, primitive instinct of self-preservation. Love is dead in me, generosity, humanity, imagination is dead,--everything but one wild-beast passion; and I find myself panting as I read: “Get some money! Get some money! Hold on to it!” * * * * * --After a while I think suddenly: “And I am a poet!” That brings a moan from me and I sit shuddering. * * * * * March 7th. Tess of the D'Urbervilles is one of the most unconvincing books I ever read. I neither believed in it nor cared about it in the slightest. I am shown a “pure woman,” and by and by I learn, to my perplexity, that she has been seduced; after which she continues the “pure woman” again, and I am asked to agonize over her troubles! But all the time I keep saying, “This is not a woman that you are showing me at all--a woman with a soul; it is a puppet figure that you suppose 'seduced' for the sake of the story.”