9 June 1913 – 15 June 1913

Depression Suffering from depression.... The melancholy fit fell very suddenly. All the colour went out of my life, the world was dirty gray. On the way back to my hotel caught sight of H----, jumping into a cab, after a visit to S---- Sands. But the sight of him aroused no desire in me to shout or wave. I merely wondered how on earth he could have spent a happy day at such a Sandy place. On arriving at ----, sank deeper into my morass. It suffocated me to find the old familiar landmarks coming into view ... the holiday-makers along the streets how I hated them--the Peg Top Hill how desolate--all as before--how dull. The very fact that they were all there as before in the morning nauseated me. The sea-coast here is magnificent, the town is pretty--I know that, of course. But all looked dreary and cheerless--just the sort of feeling one gets on entering an empty house with no fire on a winter's day and nowhere to sit down.... I felt as lonely and desolate as a man suddenly fallen from the clouds into an unknown town on the Antarctic Continent built of ice and inhabited by Penguins. Who are these people? I asked myself irritably. There perhaps on the other side of the street was my own brother. But I was not even faintly interested and told the cabman to drive on. The spray from the sea fogged my spectacles and made me weary.

The Restlessness of the Sea The restlessness of the sea acts as a soporific on jangled nerves. You gaze at its incessant activities, unwillingly at first because they distract your attention from your own cherished worries and griefs,--but later you watch with complete self-abandon--it wrenches you out of yourself--and eventually with a kind of stupid hypnotic stare. Dr. Spurgeon The day has been overcast, but to-night a soft breeze sprang up and swept the sky clear as softly as a mop. The sun coming out shone upon a white sail far out in the channel, scarcely another vessel hove in sight. The white sail glittered like a piece of silver paper whenever the mainsail swung round as the vessel tacked. Its solitariness and whiteness in a desert of marine blue attracted the attention and held it till at last I could look at nothing else. The sight of it--so clean and white and fair--set me yearning for all the rarest and most exquisite things my imagination could conjure up--a beautiful girl, with fair and sunburnt skin, brown eyes, dark eyebrows, and small pretty feet; a dewdrop in a violet's face; an orange-tip butterfly swinging on an umbel of a flower. The sail went on twinkling and began to exert an almost moral influence over me. It drew out all the good in me. I longed to follow it on white wings--an angel I suppose--to quit this husk of a body "as raiment put away," and pursue Truth and Beauty across the sea to the horizon, and beyond the horizon up the sky itself to its last tenuous confines, no doubt with a still small voice summoning me and the rest of the elect to an Agapemone, with Dr. Spurgeon at the door distributing tracts. I can scoff like this now. But at the time my exaltation was very real. My soul strained in the leash. I was full of a desire for unattainable spiritual beauty. I wanted something. But I don't know what I want.