“It is a brave thing to understand something of what we see.” Indeed it is. An exceeding brave thing. The one who said that had surely gone out on the highways and byways and found how little he could understand. To understand oneself is not so brave a thing. To go in among the hidden gray shadows of the deep things is a fool’s errand. It is not from choice that I do it. No one carries a mill-stone around her neck from choice. When I see what is among the hidden gray shadows--when I see a vision of _Myself_--I am seized with a strange, sick terror. A fool’s errand--but one that I must need go--and for that matter I myself am a fool. Yet to know oneself well is a rare fine art. I analyze myself now. I analyzed myself when I was three years old. The only difference is that at the age of three I was not aware that I analyzed. It is true, that is a great difference. Now I know that I am analyzing at nineteen, and now I know that I analyzed at three. And at the age of nineteen I know that I am a genius. A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius. A drunken man might stagger up to a piano and accidentally play music that vibrates to the soul--that touches upon the mysteries. But he does not know his power, and he is no genius, though men awaken and go mad therefrom. I know that I am a genius more than any genius that has lived. I have a feeling that the world will never know this. And as I think of it I wonder if angels are not weeping somewhere because of it. March 31. “She only said: ‘My life is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’” All day long this heart-sickening song of Mariana has been reeling and swimming in my brain. I awoke with it early in the morning, and it is still with me now in the lateness. I wondered at times during the day why that very gentle and devilishly persistent refrain did not drive me insane or send me into convulsions. I tried vainly to fix my mind on a book. I began reading “Mill on the Floss,” but that weird poem was not to be foiled. It bewitched my brain. Now, as I write, I hear twenty voices chanting in a sad minor key--twenty voices that fill my brain with sound to the bursting point. “He cometh not--he cometh not--he cometh not.” “That I were dead”--“I am aweary, aweary,--that I were dead--that I were dead.” “He cometh not--that I were dead.” It is maddening in that it is set sublimely to the music of my own life. Now that I have written it I can hope that it may leave me. If it follows me through the night, and if I awake to another day of it the cords of my overworked mind will surely break. But let me thank the kind Devil. It is leaving me now! It is as if tons were lifted from my brain. April 2.