out producing any positive result. Pain is not entirely
synonymous with Evil; but bodily pain seems less redeemed by good than
almost any other kind of it. From the loss of fortune, of fame, or
even of friends, Philosophy pretends to draw a certain compensating
benefit; but in general the permanent loss of health will bid defiance
to her alchymy. It is a universal diminution; the diminution equally
of our resources and of our capacity to guide them; a penalty
unmitigated, save by love of friends, which then first becomes truly
dear and precious to us; or by comforts brought from beyond this
earthly sphere, from that serene Fountain of peace and hope, to which
our weak Philosophy cannot raise her wing. For all men, in itself,
disease is misery; but chiefly for men of finer feelings and
endowments, to whom, in return for such superiorities, it seems to be
sent most frequently and in its most distressing forms. It is a cruel
fate for the poet to have the sunny land of his imagination, often the
sole territory he is lord of, disfigured and darkened by the shades of
pain; for one whose highest happiness is the exertion of his mental
faculties, to have them chained and paralysed in the imprisonment of a
distempered frame. With external activity, with palpable pursuits,
above all, with a suitable placidity of nature, much even in certain
states of sickness may be performed and enjoyed. But for him whose
heart is already over-keen, whose world is of the mind, ideal,
internal; when the mildew of lingering disease has struck that world,
and begun to blacken and consume its beauty, nothing seems to remain
but despondency and bitterness and desolate sorrow, felt and
anticipated, to the end.

Woe to him if his will likewise falter, if his resolution fail, and
his spirit bend its neck to the yoke of this new enemy! Idleness and a
disturbed imagination will gain the mastery of him, and let loose
their thousand fiends to harass him, to torment him into madness.
Alas! the bondage of Algiers is freedom compared with this of the sick
man of genius, whose heart has fainted and sunk beneath its load. His
clay dwelling is changed into a gloomy prison; every nerve is become
an avenue of disgust or anguish; and the soul sits within, in her
melancholy loneliness, a prey to the spectres of despair, or stupefied
with excess of suffering, doomed as it were to a 'life in death,' to a
consciousness of agonised existence, without the consciousness of