requent attacks of
angina pectoris, said to be the most painful of all diseases. During
the sixteen years of illness every symptom of bodily illness was
aggravated by the least attention to community affairs or business
matters, and also by interior trials which will presently be
described.

He was not unwilling to trace his breaking down to excessive
austerity in former years. Once when asked for advice about corporal
mortification he answered: "Don't go too fast. Remember St. Bernard's
regret for having gone too far with such things in his youth. For my
part, for many years I practised frightful penances, and now I fear
that much of my physical helplessness is due to that cause." His
state was not one of utter debility, though that quickly resulted if
watchfulness were relaxed, or from application to responsible duties.
But his strength never was to much to speak of, "only so, so," to use
his own expressions, which signified a very small amount of the power
of exertion or endurance in the muscles and nerves.

"What about my health?" he wrote from Europe. "There are days when I
feel quite myself, and then others when I sink down to the bottom. My
condition of mind and body often perplexes me, and there is nothing
left me but to abandon all into the hands of Divine Providence. The
end of it all is entirely in the dark, and were there not parallel
epochs in my past life, and similar things in the lives of some
others which I have read, my perplexity would be greater."

And again, from Ragatz, in the summer of 1875:

"My state of health is much the same. I found last week that my pulse
was bounding in a few hours from the sixties into the nineties
without any apparent cause. Yesterday I determined to consult the
leading physician here. He examined me, and, like all others,
attributes everything to my nerves, resulting from impoverished
blood. I say to myself: 1st, How long will the machine keep working
in this style? 2d, There will be a smash-up some day. 3d, Or perhaps
I shall be able to get up more steam and run it a while longer. Who
knows?"

And in another letter from the same place:

"Even here, freed from all [labors], it often seems to me that a good
breeze, if it struck me in the right place, would drive the soul out
of my body, so lightly is it connected with it, so slightly do they
hold together."

As already said, his trip to Egypt had given him a temporary relief,
and this was due, so he supposed, to