“Anything would be better than the soul-killing routine of a Professor's life.”

A memorable expression of the strain he felt between institutional work and the life of the imagination · Letter to Rabindranath Tagore, 17 October 1898

• Education
• Freedom
• Work

“Books are my only refuge, which I seek not from choice but from necessity, and I try to allay a burning breast with hard intellectual labour.”

Describing reading and intellectual work as a refuge from emotional isolation · Letter to Laurence Binyon, March 1889

• Books
• Solitude
• Work