he artifices of science,
will certainly arrive at last. The cheerful courage which enables you to
look this certainty in the face has also enabled you to extract from
years of suffering that profoundest wisdom which (as one of the wisest
of living Englishmen has told us) can be learned from suffering alone.
The admirable elasticity of your intellectual and moral nature has
enabled you, in the intervals of physical uneasiness or pain, to cast
aside every morbid thought, to enter quite fully and heartily into the
healthy life of others, and to enjoy the magnificent spectacle of the
universe with contented submission to its laws--those beneficent yet
relentless laws which to you bring debility and death. You have
continued to write notwithstanding the progress of your malady; and yet,
since it has so pitilessly held you, there is no other change in the
spirit of your compositions than the deepening of a graver beauty, the
addition of a sweeter seriousness. Not one sentence that you have
written betrays either the injustice of the invalid, or his
irritability. Your mind is not clouded by any mist from the fever
marshes, but its sympathies are far more active than they were. Your
pain has taught you a tender pity for all the pain that is outside of
you, and a patient gentleness which was wanting to your nature in its
days of barbarian health.

Surely it would be a lamentable error if mankind were to carry out the
recommendation of certain ruthless philosophers, and reject the help and
teaching of the diseased. Without undervaluing the robust performance of
healthy natures, and without encouraging literature that is morbid, that
is fevered, impatient, and perverse, we may still prize the noble
teaching which is the testament of sufferers to the world. The diseased
have a peculiar and mysterious experience; they have known the
sensations of health, and then, in addition to this knowledge, they have
gained another knowledge which enables them to think more accurately
even of health itself. A life without suffering would be like a picture
without shade. The pets of Nature, who do not know what suffering is,
and cannot realize it, have always a certain rawness, like foolish
landsmen who laugh at the terrors of the ocean, because they have
neither experience enough to know what those terrors are, nor brains
enough to imagine them.

You who are borne along, slowly but irresistibly, to that Niagara which
plunges into the gulf of d