, was
undertaken for the benefit of his health. A few weeks earlier he had
left Boston on a similar errand in company with Mr. William D. Ticknor,
who had kindly volunteered to be his companion in a trip which promised
to be of some extent and duration, and from which this faithful friend,
whose generous devotion deserves the most grateful remembrance, hoped to
bring him back restored, or at least made stronger. Death joined the
travellers, but it was not the invalid whom he selected as his victim.
The strong man was taken, and the suffering valetudinarian found himself
charged with those last duties which he was so soon to need at the hands
of others. The fatigue of mind and body thus substituted for the
recreation which he greatly needed must have hastened the course of his
disease, or at least have weakened his powers of resistance to no small
extent.

Once more, however, in company with his old college-friend and
classmate, Ex-President Pierce, he made the attempt to recover his lost
health by this second journey. My visit to him on the day before his
departure was a somewhat peculiar one, partly of friendship, but partly
also in compliance with the request I have referred to.

I asked only such questions as were like to afford practical hints as to
the way in which he should manage himself on his journey. It was more
important that he should go away as hopeful as might be than that a
searching examination should point him to the precise part diseased,
condemning him to a forlorn self-knowledge such as the masters of the
art of diagnosis sometimes rashly substitute for the ignorance which is
comparative happiness. Being supposed to remember something of the craft
pleasantly satirized in the chapter before us, I volunteered, not "an
infallible panacea of my own distillation," but some familiar
palliatives which I hoped might relieve the symptoms of which he
complained most. The history of his disease must, I suppose, remain
unwritten, and perhaps it is just as well that it should be so. Men of
sensibility and genius hate to have their infirmities dragged out of
them by the roots in exhaustive series of cross-questionings and
harassing physical explorations, and he who has enlarged the domain of
the human soul may perhaps be spared his contribution to the pathology
of the human body. At least, I was thankful that it was not my duty to
sound all the jarring chords of this sensitive organism, and that a few
cheering w