"I was going to say that I try not to let even little things—things that are thrust in my way curiously and without apparent reason that is—go uninterpreted. Why should I, for instance, have been introduced by my clergyman to the friend who was staying with him this morning, when I met them in the lane? and why should he have come in to lunch, and talked dull and trivial talk till three o'clock, and interrupted all our plans? There seems some design in it all; and yet one is so impotent to grasp what it can be.
"Yet I suppose no one has failed to notice several small coincidences in their lives, of what might almost be called a providential kind.
"I read in a book about Laennec's method, without the vaguest idea of who Laennec was, or what his method was. The next day, I see, in a chart in the village school-room, 'Laennec, inventor of the stethoscope;' and, the day following, I find and read his biography in a volume that I happen to take up to pass five minutes. And yet we say 'by chance.'
"Or I come across an expression of which I haven't grasped the precise meaning, 'gene,' let us say, or 'eclectic,' and the next day I hear the rector and curate discussing them. These are real cases.
"Or I am interrupted in my writing by Edward, who takes the letters to the post, and forces this from under my hand, as I write: not, surely, only to spare you the receipt of a dull and immature letter.
I have only one other letter of any especial interest about this date.
"If only a book could be written about a hermit, a man that deliberately left the world, retiring, not to an impracticable distance—let us say to a small farm, in a country village, with half an acre of garden—and there let no sound from the world without reach him, except incidentally, and lived a pure and uncontaminated life, watching his garden, and turning over, very slowly, such experience as he had gained in life, with the intention, if anything came of it, of telling the world any solution that occurred to him of the great question—'Is one bound to meet life in the ordinary manner, by plunging into it and swimming up the stream, or does one meet it best by abjuring it?' There is much to be said for both views. I am not at all sure that these or similar lives are not lived, and that the only practical bearing of them is that a man is _not_ bound to tell his discoveries of our enigmas. I mean, I can conceive a man, under such circumstances, reaching a very high standpoint, arriving at very lofty knowledge of the problems of fate and life, and at the same time finding a ban laid upon him, a tacit ἀνάγκη, not to reveal it to others, it being hinted to him that those who would attain to it at all must attain to it as he has himself attained, by finding out the way themselves."