Page:Collingwood - Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll.djvu/89

 failings, time lost, talents misapplied—such has been the past year.

His Diary is full of such modest depreciations of himself and his work, interspersed with earnest prayers (too sacred and private to be reproduced here) that God would forgive him the past, and help him to perform His holy will in the future. And all the time that he was thus speaking of himself as a sinner, and a man who was utterly falling short of his aim, he was living a life full of good deeds and innumerable charities, a life of incessant labour and unremitting fulfilment of duty. So, I suppose, it is always with those who have a really high ideal; the harder they try to approach it the more it seems to recede from theme, or rather, perhaps, it is impossible to be both "the subject and spectator" of goodness. As Coventry Patmore wrote:—

The reading of "Alton Locke" turned his mind towards social subjects. "If the book were but a little more definite," he writes, "it