Lucy Montgomery - Emily's Quest

"OCT. 10, 19...

"This evening was lovely. I went up on the hill and walked about until twilight had deepened into an autumn night with a benediction of starry quietude over it. I was alone but not lonely. I was a queen in halls of fancy. I held a series of conversations with imaginary comrades and thought out so many epigrams that I was agreeably surprised at myself."

"OCT. 28, 19...

"To-night I was out for one of my long walks. In a weird, purple, shadowy world, with great, cold clouds piling up above a yellow sky, hills brooding in the silence of forsaken woods, ocean tumbling on a rocky shore. The whole landscape seemed

As those who wait Till judgment speak the doom of fate.

"It made me feel... horribly ALONE.

"What a creature of moods I am!

"'Fickle,' as Aunt Elizabeth says? Temperamental,' as Andrew says?"

"NOV. 5, 19...

"What a fit of bad temper the world has indulged in! Day before yesterday she was not unbeautiful... a dignified old dame in fitting garb of brown and ermine. Yesterday she tried to ape juvenility, putting on all the airs and graces of spring, with scarfs of blue hazes. And what a bedraggled and uncomely old hag she was, all tatters and wrinkles. She grew peevish then over her own ugliness and has raged all night and day. I awakened up in the wee sma's and heard the wind shrieking in the trees and tears of rage and spite sleeting against the pane."

"NOV. 23, 19...

"This is the second day of a heavy, ceaseless autumn rain. Really, it has rained almost every day this November. We had no mail to- day. The outside world is a dismal one, with drenched and dripping trees and sodden fields. And the damp and gloom have crept into my soul and spirit and sapped out all life and energy.

"I could not read, eat, sleep, write or do anything, unless I drove myself to do it and then I felt as if I were trying to do it with somebody else's hands or brain and couldn't work very well with them. I feel lustreless, dowdy and uninviting... I even bore myself.

"I shall grow mossy in this existence!

"There! I feel better for that little outburst of discontent. It has ejected something from my system. I know that into everybody's life must come some days of depression and discouragement when all things in life seem to lose savour. The sunniest day has its clouds; but one must not forget that the sun is there all the time.

"How easy it is to be a philosopher... on paper!

"(Item:... If you are out in a cold, pouring rain, does it keep you dry to remember that the sun is there just the same?)

"Well, thank heaven no two days are ever EXACTLY alike!"

"DEC. 3, 19...

"There was a stormy, unrestful sunset to-night, behind the pale, blanched hills, gleaming angrily through the Lombardies and the dark fir-boughs in Lofty John's bush, that were now and again tossed suddenly and distressfully in a fitful gust of wind. I sat at my window and watched it. Below in the garden it was quite dark and I could only see dimly the dead leaves that were whirling and dancing uncannily over the flowerless paths. The poor dead leaves... yet not quite dead, it seemed. There was still enough unquiet life left in them to make them restless and forlorn. They harkened yet to every call of the wind, which cared for them no longer but only played freakishly with them and broke their rest. I felt sorry for the leaves as I watched them in the dull, weird twilight, and angry... in a petulant fashion that almost made me laugh... with the wind that would not leave them in peace. Why should they... and I... be vexed with these transient, passionate breaths of desire for a life which has passed us by?

"I have not heard even from Ilse for a long time. She has forgotten me, too."

"JAN. 10, 19...

"As I came home from the post-office this evening... with three acceptances... I revelled in the winter loveliness around me. It was so very calm and still; the low sun cast such pure, pale tints of pink and heliotrope over the snow; and the great, pale-silver moon peeping over the Delectable Mountain was such a friend of mine.

"How much difference in one's outlook three acceptances make!"

"JAN. 20, 19...

"The nights are so dreary now and there is such a brief space of grey, sunless day. I work and think all day and, when night comes down early, gloom settles on my soul. I can't describe the feeling. It is dreadful... worse than any actual pain. In so far as I can express it in words I feel a great and awful weariness... not of body or brain but of FEELING, coupled with a haunting dread of the future... ANY future... even a happy one... nay, a happy one most of all, for in this strange mood it seems to me that to be happy would require more effort... more buoyancy than I shall possess. The fantastic shape my fear assumes is that it would be TOO MUCH TROUBLE to be happy... require too much energy.

"Let me be honest... in this journal if nowhere else. I know quite well what is the matter with me. This afternoon I was rummaging in my old trunk in the garret and found a packet of the letters Teddy wrote the first year he was in Montreal. I was foolish enough to sit down and read them all. It was a mad thing to do. I am paying for it now. Such letters have a terrible resurrective power. I am surrounded by bitter fancies and unbidden ghosts... the little spectral joys of the past."

"FEB. 5, 19...

"Life never seems the same to me as it used to. Something is GONE. I am not unhappy. But life seems a sort of negative affair. I enjoy it on the whole and have many beautiful moments. I have success... at least a sort of success... in growing measure and a keen appreciation of all the world and the times offer for delight and interest. But underneath it all is the haunting sense of emptiness. This is all because 'full knee-deep lies the winter snow' and I can't go a-prowling. Wait till a thaw comes, when I can get out to the balm of the fir-trees and the peace of the white places and the 'strength of the hills'... what a beautiful old Biblical phrase that is!... and I shall be made whole once more."

"FEB. 6, 19...

"Last night I simply could not endure any longer the vaseful of dyed grasses on my mantelpiece. What if they had been there for forty years! I seized them, opened the window and strewed them over the lawn. This soothed me so that I slept like an infant. But this morning Cousin Jimmy had gathered them all up and handed them secretly back to me with a gentle warning not to let them 'blow out' again. Elizabeth would be horrified.

"I put them back in the vase. One cannot escape one's kismet."

"FEB. 22, 19...

"There was a creamy, misty sunset this evening and then moonlight. Such moonlight. It is such a night as one might fall asleep in and dream happy dreams of gardens and songs and companionship, feeling all the while through one's sleep the splendour and radiance of the white moon-world outside as one hears soft, far-away music sounding through the thoughts and words that are born of it.

"I slipped away for a solitary walk through that fairy world of glamour. I went through the orchard where the black shadows of the trees fell over the snow... I went up to the gleaming white hill with the stars over it, I lurked along fir copses dim with mystery and along still, wood aisles where the night hid from the moonshine, I loitered across a dreamland field of ebon and ivory. I had a tryst with my friend of old days, the Wind Woman. And every breath was a lyric and every thought an ecstasy and I've come back with a soul washed white and clean in the great crystal bath of the night.