by day the
advancing steps of the disease that never sleeps, I recognise in myself
a strange adaptation in my mind and feelings to the more developed
condition of my illness. At first, my cough irritated and fevered me.
It awoke me if I slept--it worried me as I read; my fast and hurried
breathing, too, exciting the heart's action, rendered me impatient and
discontented. Now, both these symptoms are in excess, and yet, by habit
and some acquired power of conforming to them, I am scarcely aware of
their existence. I have learned to look on them as my normal, natural
condition. My cough on awaking in the morning--my hectic as night
falls--only tell of the day's dawn and decline. I fancy that this dreamy
calm, this spirit of submissive waiting that I feel, is dependent on my
infirmity; for how otherwise could I, if strong in mind and body,
endure the thraldom of my present life? The watchful egotism of sickness
demands the mind of sickness.

In the whole phenomena of malady, nothing is more striking than the
accommodation of the mind to the condition of suffering. I remember
once--I was then in all the strength and confidence of youth and
health--discussing this point with a friend, a physician of skill and
eminence, now no more, and was greatly struck by a theory which was
new, at least to me. He regarded every species of disease, from the most
simple to the most complicated, as a sanatory process, an effort--not
always successful, of course--on the part of Nature to restore the
system to its condition of health. He instanced maladies the most
formidable, some of them attended by symptoms of terrible suffering; but
in every case he assumed to shew that they were efforts to oppose the
march of some other species of disorganisation. So far from there being
any taint of Materialism in these views, he deduced from them a most
devout and conscientious belief in a Supreme Power; and instead of
resting upon Contrivance and Design as the great attributes of the
Deity, he went further, and made the Forethought, the Providence of God
for his creatures, the great object of his wonderment and praise. His
argument, if I dare trust my memory, was briefly this: The presence of
a superintending guardian spirit, ever watchful to avert evil from its
charge, is the essential difference which separates every object of
God's creation from the mere work of man's hand. The ingenuity that
contrived the mechanism of a steam-engine or a clock, was