e often found, that the
more the nervous centres are employed in those offices of thought and
feeling the most removed from material objects,--the more the nervous
energy of the entire nature is concentrated, engrossed, and used up in
such offices,--so much the more and therefore, are those organs of the
body which preside over that organic life, common to ourselves and the
lowest worm, defrauded of their necessary nervous food,--and being in
the organic and not in the animal department, and having no voice to
tell their wants or wrongs, till they wake up and annoy their neighbors
who have a voice, that is, who are sensitive to pain, they may have been
long ill before they come into the sphere of consciousness. This is the
true reason--along with want of purity and change of air, want of
exercise,[31] want of shifting the work of the body--why clergymen, men
of letters, and all men of intense mental application, are so liable to
be affected with indigestion, constipation, lumbago, and lowness of
spirits, _melancholia_--black bile. The brain may not give way for long,
because for a time the law of exercise strengthens it; it is fed high,
gets the best of everything, of blood and nervous pabulum, and then men
have a joy in the victorious work of their brain, and it has a joy of
its own, too, which deludes and misleads.

[31] "The youth Story was in all respects healthy, and even
robust; he died of overwork, or rather, as I understand, of
a two years' almost total want of exercise, which it was
impossible to induce him to take.'--_Arnold's Report to the
Committee of Council on Education_, 1860.

All this happened to my father. He had no formal disease when he
died--no structural change; his sleep and his digestion would have been
quite sufficient for life even up to the last; the mechanism was entire,
but the motive-power was gone--it was expended. The silver cord was not
so much loosed as relaxed. The golden bowl, the pitcher at the fountain,
the wheel at the cistern, were not so much broken as emptied and stayed.
The clock had run down before its time, and there was no one but He who
first wound it up and set it who could wind it up again; and this He
does not do, because it is His law--an express injunction from
Him--that, having measured out to his creatures each his measure of
life, and left him to the freedom of his own will and the regulation of
his reason, He also leaves him to r