It is only you who can teach yourself that, whatever the _present_ may be, you must front it with dignity.... I could only point out to you the fulfilment of duties which can make life--not happy--what can? but earnest, sacred, and resigned.... I am carrying a burden even heavier than you, and have undergone even bitterer deceptions. Your life proves an empty thing, you say. Empty! Do not blaspheme. Have you never done good? Have you never loved? ... Pain and joy, deception and fulfilled hopes are just the rain and the sunshine that must meet the traveller on his way. Bless the Almighty if He has thought proper to send the latter to you.... Wrap your cloak round you against the first, but do not think a single moment that the one or the other have anything to do with the _end_ of the journey. Carlyle's first letter after the rupture is a mixture of reproach and affection. "We never parted before in such a manner; and all for literally nothing.... Adieu, dearest, for that is, and, if madness prevail not, may for ever be your authentic title." Another, enclosing the birthday present which he had never omitted since her mother's death, softened his wife's resentment, and the storm blew over for a time. But while the cause remained there was in the house at best a surface tranquillity, at worst an under tone of misery which (October 1855 to May 1856) finds voice in the famous Diary, not merely covered with "black spider webs," but steeped in gall, the publication of which has made so much debate. It is like a page from _Othello_ reversed. A few sentences condense the refrain of the lament. "Charles Buller said of the Duchess de Praslin, 'What could a poor fellow do with a wife that kept a journal but murder her?'" "That eternal Bath House. I wonder how many thousand miles Mr. C. has walked between here and there?" "Being an only child, I never wished to sew men's trousers--no, never!" I gin to think I've sold myself For very little cas." "To-day I called on my lady: she was perfectly civil, for a wonder." "Edward Irving! The past is past and gone is gone-- O waly, waly, love is bonnie, A little while when it is new;" quotations which, laid alongside the records of the writer's visit to the people at Haddington, "who seem all to grow so good and kind as they grow old," and to the graves in the churchyard there, are infinitely pathetic. The letters that follow are in the same strain, _e.g._ to Carlyle when visiting his sister at the Gill, "I never forget kindness, nor, alas, unkindness either": to Luichart, "I don't believe thee, wishing yourself at home.... You don't, as weakly amiable people do, sacrifice yourself for the pleasure of others"; to Mrs. Russell at Thornhill, "My London doctor's prescription is that I should be kept always happy and tranquil(!!!)."