On Being Ill

I

THERE are, according to the poet, ‘ four seasons in the mind of man ’ and each has its appropriate mood, its range of vision, its philosophy. But, in addition to these four seasons, there are two other categories which shift a man’s thoughts, the object of his vision and his philosophy, even more than the change from Spring to Summer or from Autumn to Winter. These other categories are health and sickness. In these two states man beholds two very different worlds; so different are these worlds, that if a man should live in one only, he would know but half of the human universe.

Health is the normal state. In it the faculties are in equilibrium and fulfill their obvious duties. Upon it, as if it were a sure foundation, science builds hypotheses and dogmas, and men of action with a turn for literature construct what they call a sane and happy philosophy of life. Health is the condition of life’s daily routine. Health accepts life as a matter of course, without demur, without criticism, almost without appreciation. A healthy man is indifferent to all theories about the universe; one theory is as good as another. He himself is the centre of his universe; and his senses, like so many radii, describe its uttermost bounds.

Suppose the healthy man to be a farmer. Then the prime interests of his life will cluster around his barn, his cowshed, and his vegetable garden. His affections embrace his potato-hillocks, his purpling cabbages, and the cornpatch, where in July the stately stalks deck their heads with plumes and outdo in parallel symmetry the spears of Velasquez’s conquering Spaniards at Breda. Here is his universe — house, barn, woodpile, chicken-run, pump, orchard, and meadows; what to him are the outlying regions beyond the farm limits? How is he concerned with fields and woodland across the county turnpike, with countries over seas, or with the ethereal distances that encompass our solar system? Health has fixed the bounds of his intellectual kingdom. Its axis is in the stable, and all the cloud-capped hypotheses that science, with infinite industry, has built up concerning what lies between his boundary line and the farthest regions of infinite space, count for less than the humming of the tea-kettle or the cackle of the hens. All attempts by science or philosophy to shift the central point of his universe to some part of the Milky Way or to the Absolute, must fail. And yet it is upon the healthy man, upon the reports of his senses, upon the processes of his reason, that science builds its truths, and philosophy its hypotheses.

The business of a healthy man is to live his life; and in order to live it well, he must make himself, so far as he can, a creature of instinct, if possible an automaton. He adores the god of action, because health is, in its manifestations, a mere bundle of activities. To love action is the patriotism of health. This attitude toward life gives a comfortable sense of snugness, of familiarity, of home, and protects such as adopt it against the vast outer universe that serves, it seems, but to confuse and dismay them. It holds a man ’s attention fast to the region where he fills his belly, chooses his wife, digs, hoes, drives his cows afield and calls them home to the milking. This attitude is natural, human; it proclaims man’s origin. But in the opinion of those who care for unrestricted liberty of speculation and imagining, it deprives the human mind of its noblest birthright. For them it is high treason to what should be man’s governing principle. Nevertheless action remains the basis of life; and as even the most skeptical critic must admit, action renders a service that might well seem to compensate for all the limitations which it imposes upon the human spirit. Action makes a theatre out of life.

If we were to weigh with even hand, one by one, the good and evil things that fate lays in the balances, in order to determine whether human life be worth the living, perhaps none of the things deemed good — not the luxuriant vitality of youth, not affection or romantic love, not interest in work or the approbation of our fellows — would weigh as heavily as the pleasure got from the theatre of life. The drama of life is unintermittent, boundless in resource; of infinite variety, it appeals to every taste. It reckons up its actors by the million. It dresses up in royal robes, with crowns, sceptres, and all the wardrobe of imperial millinery, kings and emperors, moves them about, and causes them to utter majestic harangues, and pirouette over the stage in a manner to rivet our amazed attention. It takes bandits, pirates, Cossacks, and parades them to and fro to a wild music. And these are but supernumeraries who fill in the background and the wings of the stage. A little in front of them come players whose names are printed on the programme, enumerated as statesmen, philosophers, poets, musicians, explorers, and so on. Finally, in front of them all come the protagonists in Everyman’s drama — the household headed by the cook, the milkman, and the butcher’s boy, the immediate neighbors, and each separate group playing its own comedy within the great comedy, husband and wife, nursery-maid and babies, school-boys and tutors, guests, cousins, callers, and all the multitude who fill the minor rôles, the chauffeur, the trolley-car conductor, the old lady who in times of illness comes to advise mental healing, the elderly clerk, the lazy office-boy, the fashionable tailor, the cobbler round the corner, the habitué at the club, the fruit-vender, the policeman, the parson’s assistant, the political reformer. The theatre of life, with its tragedy, comedy, farce, its gruesome scenes and its delightful episodes, has but one patent fault — it has no plot and no apparent meaning.

Healthy men, the rich, the pious, praise both plot and meaning; but the indifferent spectator can distinguish neither — nothing but eternal motion. A rational explanation of action is that in providing the theatre of life it furnishes the justification of life. All living things are actors who keep on going in order that scene shall follow scene without intermission; for this men preserve their own lives, for this they rear children, future actors, who shall take the places of those whose parts are ended. ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players,’ but men and women are also spectators. All are admitted to the show; some sit in the orchestra, some in the upper gallery. At one and the same time all men are both players and spectators; they may be mute supernumeraries in the noisier parts of the drama, but all are protagonists of some particular episode. All this we owe to action, and action is the product of health.

Action, then, keeps life alive and furnishes a nonpareil theatre. To the eyes of the healthy man this theatre is delightful and life an invaluable possession. This is the mood of health.

II

Once a man is ill, the scene changes. All that great stretch of universe that formerly reached out, in dusky dimness, from beyond the farm road toward infinity, has sunk below the horizon, it has become as if it had never been. The field of corn, the potatopatch, the flower-garden, the graveled walk, the porch, have also become part of uncharted darkness, merged into chaos; even hall, stairway, the whole house outside the sickroom door, is now beyond the further edge of twilight consciousness. The sick man’s physical universe has shrunk to a bedroom. It is circumscribed by four narrow walls, but it serves all the purposes of the mightiest universe, it fills his thoughts, and presents those marks of order and intelligibility that distinguish the tract within the intellectual reach of the human mind from whatever may lie beyond. It has advantages over any larger universe in that the smaller it is, the more intelligible, the more homelike, it becomes — the more clearly it stands in definite relations to the sick man’s inner self.

The central point of interest is his bed. The white coverlet lies like newfallen snow. Under it his legs, two long projections with which he appears to have little or nothing to do, stretch away down toward the foot of the bed, like mountain ranges on a map of physical geography; while the light covering falls away in gentle slopes on either side. Then the brass bedpost catches his eye. It draws to itself more than its share of light, and, as if the words Fiat Lux had been spoken directly to it, radiates brazenly.

But an object near by, on the table at the foot of the bed, is far more interesting. A long green stalk rises from a yellow vase, and stands very tall and straight in its pride at carrying the perfect flower that, with its snowy petals half disclosed, half folded as if to hold their fragrance in, crowns the green stem. This white rose is a triumphant issue of the efforts of Nature, of her experiments in valley and meadow, in sunshine and in shade, the achievement of the noble collaboration of root and stalk, of leaves and blossoms.

If Nature had aimed to produce color only, or fragrance only, it would be seemingly intelligible that man should chance to be pleased by the color or by the fragrance; but according to what doctrine of chances should a man be charmed, not only by the color and the fragrance, but also by the exquisite texture of the petals that fits them for no rougher office than to line a fairy’s cradle? Each petal opens at the touch of light, and then, as if the caress of the full sunlight were too poignant, covers itself with shadows and half-tones.

In a state of health one accepts a rose as part of the great adventure, not less wonderful, or more, than all the other elements that go to make up that adventure. But the mind, half set free from the emaciated body, cannot take the rose merely so. Why is it that Milton plants roses thick in his Garden of Eden; why does Dante make the saints and angels of God but petals in the vast rose of the heaven of heavens? Why is there never a lover that does not compare his mistress to a rose? Can it be by chance that the rose and the soul of man are matched so melodiously? And as the rose has traveled along her vegetable path, trusting to the wind or to the honey-bee for transportation to a kindlier soil, is it chance that has conferred upon her this combination of color, fragrance and texture, and brought her, as it were, to a trysting-place with the soul of man, who, on his part, having traced his way through millions of years down a dark path, has attained the senses that are ravished by that union of color, fragrance, and texture? What service has the rose rendered to our ancestors that we should admire her beyond all rational measure? Did she feed them, clothe them, warm them, or serve to deck some otherwise unattractive maid and win for her a wooer? Did our ancestors, whether beasts or human progenitors of retreating skull and tusklike teeth, breathe in her beauty and take fresh courage for the battle of life? Can it be by chance that man has come to find in a flower the great symbol of Beauty? Why is not the fruit more beautiful to him than the flower? Why not the vegetable than the fruit? Why not the fish than the vegetable, or a lamb chop most beautiful of all?

The rose does not help the human being, even to-day, in the struggle for life; rather she is a hindrance. She stands there in the vase, and as the sick man’s delighted eye follows the contour of leaf and petal, and dwells upon the dainty setting of the corolla in the calyx (as if the soul of a bird had alighted on the soul of a nest), she asserts, ‘To gaze on Beauty is the nobleness of life.’

Is this chance? Or is there some element in the spirit of man that renders him, as he proceeds upon his upward journey, more sensitive to Beauty; that, as time goes on, will cause him to perceive Beauty lying thick about him, in flower, leaf, crystal, waterdrop, in every clod of common earth, and so at last establish harmonious relations between him and all that is? Is this the end to which life consciously aspires, the argument to justify creation and existence?

To the spirit, still uncertain of long sojourn in its fleshly dress, the beauty of the rose is a tormenting riddle. The spirit keeps asking, ‘Why, why, am I imprisoned in this compound of dust, condemned to suffer when this insensible machine goes wrong? What whimsical power commanded me, a spirit, to be conscious of physical maladjustment?’ And the rose keeps answering, ‘You are also conscious of me.’

Is knowledge of the rose a piece of mystical experience, a communion with a symbol of pure beauty, a partial and momentary loss of self in the consciousness of that which is Life’s explanation? The mystics, bound by the words and phrases of human experience, use images of light, of sound, of sweetness; but in all they say, they merely try to express what the rose is to the sick man. Is every sick man a mystic? Does illness dilapidate the blocks of physical dogma out of which is built the edifice of daily life? Does it dissolve the mortar of the matter-of-fact, dispel the illusions of habitual action, and leave the soul face to face with symbols of something toward which all life aspires?

III

A little beyond the foot of the bed come the fireplace and mantelpiece. The small dimensions of the room leave but a narrow passage for a whitecapped, white-aproned ministrant, who walks to and fro with noiseless steps, and, when the clock strikes the hour, brings a spoonful of some medicinal potion which custom, or fashion, or hope, foists upon the sick. The wood fire preaches mortality, as it resolves into their elements the logs of oak, chestnut, and birch which cost Nature so much pains to endow with life. But another symbol withdraws the wandering eye from the fire. On the mantelpiece, leaning against the wall, there is a rude picture, painted on copper in archaic Flemish style. The subject is the Crucifixion. At the foot of the Cross Mary stands erect, John with bowed head close by, and hovering in the air little truncated cherubs catch in golden chalices the drops of blood that fall from the dead Christ’s wounds. At first one jumps to the conclusion that this scene, acknowledged throughout Christendom as the supreme human tragedy, has been always misunderstood. The minds of men have been preoccupied by the ecclesiastical interpretation, which regards the Crucified Christ as the centre of the tragedy, and puts at the climax of its litany, ‘By thy cross and passion.’ The spectacle of physical suffering, especially to men in health, wrings the corporeal sensibility, and in the case of finely tuned natures even imprints imitative marks in hands and feet and side; and yet a far deeper suffering was endured at the foot of the cross. Mary is the centre of the tragedy: —

The poet knew that the mother was the greater sufferer, for a sword had also pierced his soul. She, who had stored up in her heart all the words of her little boy, all the sayings of her eldest son, her beautiful youth, her divine leader of men, suffered more pain than nails or lance have power to inflict. Nevertheless Mary is not the centre of the tragedy. Christendom is right; instinctively it feels that the figure on the Cross is the cynosure of human interest.

The Crucifixion is a tragedy, not because it represents human pain, even pain undeserved, but because the Cross passionately asserts a truth at the heart of life. There, on the Cross, hangs a body, worshiped by Christendom as the body of one who in himself incorporated both the human and the divine. This belief gives superhuman poignancy to the Crucifixion. The belief in this union of man and God in Christ Crucified is true, not because God came down from his celestial throne to earth, but because man is the highest exponent of the mysterious force that pulses through the universe, the clearest evidence of divinity. Why should we care whether the divine is human, when there is such abundant witness that the human is divine, in all that we demand of the divine? In heroism, in self-sacrifice, in the power of loving?

To the sick man the divine reveals itself in many a way; it fills his sick room. He does not ask that angels shall minister to him, for woman’s hands smooth his pillow, bring him a marvelous beverage called milk, and a delicate, transparent, glittering mass of bubbles that dance in rainbow colors within the tumbler. This ambrosia the prosaic nurse calls whipped-up white of egg, as if by mere words she could exorcise the spirit of poetry. Poetry invades the sick room, it sings in the sunbeams, it leaps with the leaping flames of the fire, and snuggles in the bosom of the rose. Poetry is but the harbinger of the divine, and both express themselves in the human voice. If the forces of life can take the dust of the earth and compound it into a woman’s hands, and that miracle does not convince us that the forces of life are divine, then no other miracles or revelations will.

The divine manifests itself in beauty, in poetry, in light, in the rose, in human affections. But in order to manifest itself the divine must first exist; and the Crucifixion testifies that that which is potentially divine can become divine only through pain. This is the teaching of the Crucifixion, and this is more readily set forth for the multitude by obvious symbols of nails and spear-thrust, than in the mother’s woe. The Crucifixion is the supreme allegory of the triumph of the divine through pain, the symbol that divinity is the child of pain, and only by the ministration of pain comes to birth.

It may be that pain is a process of purification, of rarefaction of the spirit, and so enables the spirit’s more ethereal part to rise, leaving behind that which clogs and impedes its flight. This doctrine has long been held with respect to man, — patiendo fit homo melior, — and, inasmuch as man is but an integral part of all the universe, how can a law be true for him if it be not true also for all the universe? All the nervous system — if the answer is to be looked for in the collocation of cells — has come into being in order to increase life, to enlarge it, to render it more sensitive. If the vibrations that cause consciousness of sound, of sight, touch, smell, warmth, and the rest, are creating mind, or enabling mind to possess a local habitation, and if pain hovers about these vibrations, as a mother hovers about her children, and if the sterner tempering of character is wrought by pain, what can we do but acknowledge that pain is mysteriously at work around, above, and below us, guiding, warning, chastising, blessing, using the mind of man as material for its high purpose of creating the divine?

This is but the humdrum attempt of the well man to express in words the thoughts that haunted him when sick. While he lay in bed, he did not need the intervention of words. To the sick man words are gross, palpable things; they come with footfall heavier than that of the choreman who fetches wood for the fire; and each word, like a traveler from regions of ice and snow, is wrapped in all sorts of outer garments that conceal the thought within. They disturb the quiet of the room; they distort and caricature the fine Ariels of thought that hover just outside the portals of comprehension, and would come in, were words delicate enough not to travesty them. Thoughts crowd about, eager to explain, longing to tell the sick man why it is that pain is his benefactor; and when they pass through the gates of comprehension, and are stuffed into words, they are no longer Ariels, but mummers that gesticulate, make faces, and mock the listener. This is the vexation the sick man endures; he feels that he has been lifted to purer regions, closer to the meaning that for him, at least, lies hidden behind symbols, — behind the crucifix, the rose, a woman’s hand, behind light, behind love, — and yet he can never remember, after he has returned to earth, just what he really experienced and believed.

But if he turns his attention from that which he vainly hopes to find in the wallet of his memory (you cannot fetch home light in a bag) to what is really there, he finds religion. Then, at last, he realizes what sickness is doing for him. The healthy man has no time for religion; he is concerned with action. He must plough his field, sow his corn, hoe his potatoes, and trail the honeysuckle over the trellis. His mind is busy with manifold occupations, hopes, and anxieties. The theatre of life, filling the stage of his universe, takes what leisure he may have. Or, if he has a religion, it is either an inheritance, like his grandfather’s clothes fitted for a man of different stature, or one which he has constructed out of fears of the evil that may befall, or out of gratitude for evil escaped.

The sick man is in quite a different case. His stage is shrunk to his bedroom; his drama observes the unities. But for the dumb presence of the nurse, he is alone, alone with the white rose, with the picture of the Crucifixion, with his body, and the hovering spirits of Life and Death. His drama has become as simple as that of Æschylus, and he drifts off into the religious mood, a mood of humble curiosity concerning life, and of quest for a loyalty which shall assert that his need of holiness is proof that his soul has received an imprint, no matter how faint, from the presence of holiness.

The first feeling is of curiosity. What is this life that floats, like the Ark, upon a waste of inanimate turbulence? Everywhere motion, everywhere disquiet, everywhere perturbation, restlessness. Is it only in this chance combination of cells, the brain, that Consciousness can make her dwellingplace? And does my consciousness merely reflect for a time the multitudinous outside world, like the surface of a pool, and then, as when the water sinks away into the sands beneath, reflect no more? Is it all mere chance — the white rose, the Crucifixion, the Son nailed to the Cross, the Mother in agony upon the ground beneath? Were these things caused by chance, or are there forces that have a purpose and tend toward an end, in whose obedience a man may range himself, and spend himself in an effort to achieve? Is there a soul of the universe with which his soul can confederate?

IV

How shall a man go about to find the soul of the universe? What shibboleth, what badge, shall he look for? What do we mean by holiness? What modern symbol shall replace the Cross? And, just as illness is the body’s release from the activities of life, does there come a further release for the soul, that will not deprive it of consciousness, and nevertheless leave it appeased? Is holiness a mere series of resignations, the bidding farewell one after another to the impulses of life, the desires of the body and the mind, the shaking off as much as may be of all corporeal control? Or is it an abstraction deduced from the higher pleasures of life, from heroism, from the exaltations of sacrifice, from the joy of pure thought? Or do our souls come into touch, as our earth’s atmosphere touches the ethereal space beyond, with an over-soul, and become hallowed by that communion? Or is the upward flight of the soul of necessity in and through a region that, by its remoteness from the friction of life at our world’s centre, inspires the human spirit with a calm, a cool, a peace, and an exaltation?

Cut off from all action, floating down a stream of incoherent thoughts, the sick man comes to feel that he has had an experience of holiness, like a pilgrim who has visited some far-off sanctuary. His sickroom has become a shrine. Here he has been alone, face to face with the one question that to him is real — all other questions, all other aspects of things, all perplexities, having been swallowed up in the night of chaos beyond the limits of his sickroom universe.

Illness is the great privilege of life. Love only is comparable to it. They are twin privileges. Both deny the common value of things; both assert that Man’s destiny is bound up with transcendental powers. Of this, theirs is the only testimony we have; for the body’s evidence is a denial — a negative assertion that the sparkle of consciousness is a random striking of substance on substance, like steel on flint. Illness pares and lops off the outer parts of life and leaves us with the essence of it. That essence searches curiously for its fundamental relationships. Is this consciousness of mine — which becomes, when shrunk to its inmost being, a spiritual hunger for union with something other than itself — a mere separate particle of what was once an ocean of being? Does it imply that a universal soul has disintegrated, that all its constituent elements have been broken up and scattered, each still impressed with the memory that they were once parts of a whole? Or is this hunger but a sign of a new awakening—the first movement toward a combination, a union, that shall be divine?

Is there a Creator? Or is the idea of a Creator the product of corporeal illness, which has subdued the human soul and too lightly applied the human analogy of man reshaping matter? Who would willingly admit a Creator that had created this universe, with all its suffering, unless upon the supposition that He was so cramped by fate or dearth of material, that He could only create it of warring forces and dragons’ teeth? And who can conceive that mechanical forces, in the course of myriad encounters with one another, have by mere accident struck out the sparks of mind?

And why this eternal commotion? Is all this turmoil the struggle of a baser element to attain self-realization, to achieve psychic life? Is the whole universe seeking more life and fuller? Or is Life our original sin, and Death the great purifier? Is it beneficent Death that is striving to cast out the vexing seeds of Life, and restore a universal calm? Is Death the great ocean of peace to which all the rivers of existence flow? Is the blotting out of the universe beyond the farm road, the reduction of it to a small sickroom, the diminution of the innumerable dramatis personœ to one white-capped, whiteaproned figure, a sample of the divine effort toward simplicity and peace? Is consciousness the real ill? Is this universal commotion harmless till consciousness arises? Is Life a privilege, a duty, or a sin? Why should our ripples disturb the peace of God?

While these fancies come and go, there stands the picture of the Crucifixion, there the white rose opens its petals wider hour by hour, as if it would enfold the world in the arms of its fragrance. The one proclaims that there is a greater nobleness in pain than the inanimate is capable of; the other asks, ‘What but a beneficent force could create a white rose or a child?’

How can one answer them? These are witnesses that Life is nobler than Death. The human heart does beat quicker at the sight of a will to suffer; it does rejoice at roses. If the propulsive rhythm of the universe has produced these as samples of its purposes, as intimations of its goal, does not the whole pattern of existence seem suddenly to burst out as if written in letters of light? Right and wrong cease to be meaningless terms; and a way opens to act in unison with the motions of the universe, and help, no matter in how trivial a respect, its upward will to prevail. The music of hope blows in the winter wind, sings in April showers, murmurs in the mysterious noises of the woods, in the voices of men, in the anguish of the crucifix, calling upon Life to feel, to enjoy, and to suffer for the sake of more life.

In this way the sick man’s thoughts go to and fro. The drama of life has simplified itself into a mystery play. Life parleys with Death. Death urges peace:—

But in the soft, caressing insistence upon the pleasantness of peace, how can we tell whether the attraction that draws us on to lie stiller and stiller is a summing up of all the arguments that belittle life and extol death, or a mere self-indulgence of the body, counseling ease? Does this sweetly magical incantation, under which the limbs lie quiet and the hands involuntarily clasp themselves on the breast, come from the body or the mind? And is remembrance of happy days, is the pleading of old maxims that condemn a physical surrender to death, is the desire to worship a god of the living, a mere psychical mechanism set in motion by the heart, beating rhythmically to the oscillations that run through the physical universe? Is it all a religious mystery play? Life is religious, Death is religious. The question, Shall I live or shall I die? resolves itself into a question of loyalty. Is Life or Death our God?

The return from illness to health is like coming up from a dive, supposing the time from when the swimmer first sees light through the water until his head rises to the surface to be the affair of weeks. The change in physical condition may be slow, but the change in orientation takes place in a twinkling and is complete. The eye no longer looks down into unplumbed deeps, but back toward the light of day; curiosity for the ultimate yields to a golden memory of familiar things — friends, household goods, books, barking dogs, the freshness of grass and trees. The body has reasserted itself. The dreaming imagination is dragged away from its goal by the galloping senses. Eye, ear, touch, taste start upon a rampage. Especially does the appetite for food wax furious, discovering itself endowed with power to transform a coddled egg into something rich and strange, and to illumine chicken broth with a charm that no art can equal. The universe, lately shrunk to the sick room, now rises again like the genie out of the bottle in which he had been imprisoned; the sickroom becomes a house of detention, and at its door, as in a seashell clapped to the ear, the convalescent hearkens to all the rumors of the outer world.

It is the very completeness of the body’s triumph that constitutes the weakness of its permanent victory. The exultation with which it mocks the dreamy imagination is too plainly the work of recovering nerves, of reinvigorated muscles, of hungry physical organs. It is a triumph of force, not of reason. Health is not magnanimous; it prosecutes its victory relentlessly, as if it feared to leave a single dreamy thought unquenched. Its victory proves nothing except that we are living things. Perhaps the dead rejoice in death, as greatly as the living do in life.

Convalescence, however, is a pleasant time. Away with Thomas à Kempis, Obermann, Amiel, away with anchorites and monks, bats that haunt the chill vaults of the antechamber of Death.

The sick man on his path back to life has a voracious appetite for the humor, the gayety, the light follies of life. He bids the nurse take away the Bible and Paradise Lost, which during his dark days he had kept at his elbow; he asks for Punch, Pickwick, La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque, Don Quixote. Mirth, even in its ruder livery, appears as the most desirable of human emotions. Falstaff comes habited in a magical radiance, as if jollity were humanity’s noblest attribute. And, indeed, if the partisans of Health are right, there is no very good reason for supposing that it is not.

The convalescent’s ears crave the crowing of the cock, the cluck of hens, the grunt of pigs; even the expletives of the passing teamster sound with a rough music, chiming in with the universal chorus of the world’s noises that sing a pæan in praise of life. Life seizes upon every means of appeal within its power to lure the sick man back from the worship of death. There is something almost comic in its solicitude lest it should lose one adorer. No coquette — not Beatrice nor Célimène — ever took such pains, adjusted ribbons, ringlets, ruffles, lifted or dropped her eyes, turned a slim neck, or smiled or sighed, with a tithe of the flirtatious activities of Life. Each man fancies himself an Antony, with the spirit of Life, a very Cleopatra, head over heels enamoured of him, and he yields to her bewitching lure.

At last the nurse goes, the doctor takes his leave, the medicine bottles are put on the closet shelf, the patient is up and about; and then, thoroughly subdued to the humors of Life, — for Life is April when it woos, December when it weds, — he is turned out of doors, back to the dull daily routine, back to hoeing, ploughing, weeding, to haggling, buying and selling, back to the world of living men. Life, the Circe who looked so fair, has bewitched him, metamorphosed him into a human animal, put her collar on him and turned him loose, to run on all fours like other animals after the things that seem to them desirable.

Even then, in moments of leisure, in twilight intervals between the work of day and the hours of sleep, or, when on a starry night he leans forth from his window, as St. Augustine and Monica leaned from the window of their inn at Ostia to brood over the text, ‘Enter thou into the joy of the Lord ’ — in such moments he broods over the thoughts that swept over him when sick, and he muses upon the strangeness of life and wonders whether he did not see more clearly with his heavy eyes and apprehend more clearly with his fevered brow, when he lay upon the bed in his sickroom, than now when busy with the rough activities of life.