t in some respects have
gained, for much of the discourse which was shouted and sometimes
screamed at the full pitch of his keen voice, was of a kind to be better
rendered in his deep, quiet, settled tones. This, and the great length
of his public services, I knew he himself felt, when too late, had
injured him, and many a smile he had at my proposal to have a secret
sub-congregational string from him to me in the back seat, to be
authoritatively twitched when I knew he had done enough; but this string
was never pulled, even in his mind.

He went on in this expensive life, sleeping very little, and always
lightly, eating little, never walking except of necessity; little in
company, when he would have eaten more and been, by the power of social
relish, made likelier to get the full good out of his food; never
diverting his mind by any change but that of one book or subject for
another; and every time that any strong affliction came on him, as when
made twice a widower, or at his daughter's death, or from such an
outrage upon his entire nature and feelings as the Libel, then his
delicate machinery was shaken and damaged, not merely by the first
shock, but even more by that unrelenting self-command by which he
terrified his body into instant submission. Thus it was, and thus it
ever must be, if the laws of our bodily constitution, laid down by Him
who knows our frame, and from whom our substance is not hid, are set at
nought, knowingly or not--if knowingly, the act is so much the more
spiritually bad--but if not, it is still punished with the same unerring
nicety, the same commensurate meting out of the penalty, and paying "in
full tale," as makes the sun to know his time, and splits an erring
planet into fragments, driving it into space "with hideous ruin and
combustion." It is a pitiful and a sad thing to say, but if my father
had not been a prodigal in a true but very different meaning, if he had
not spent his substance, the portion of goods that fell to him, the
capital of life given him by God, in what we must believe to have been
needless and therefore preventable excess of effort, we might have had
him still with us, shining more and more, and he and they who were with
him would have been spared those two years of the valley of the shadow,
with its sharp and steady pain, its fallings away of life, its longing
for the grave, its sleepless nights and days of weariness and languor,
the full expression of which you will