ey to lowness of spirits: at this some dull men
have marvelled; but the dull have no misgivings: they go blindly and
stupidly on, like a horse in a mill, and have none of the sorrows or
joys which genius is heir to.]

_Ellisland, 13th December, 1789._

Many thanks, dear Madam, for your sheet-full of rhymes. Though at
present I am below the veriest prose, yet from you everything pleases.
I am groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous system; a
system, the state of which is most conducive to our happiness--or the
most productive of our misery. For now near three weeks I have been so
ill with a nervous head-ache, that I have been obliged for a time to
give up my excise-books, being scarce able to lift my head, much less
to ride once a week over ten muir parishes. What is man?--To-day in
the luxuriance of health, exulting in the enjoyment of existence; in a
few days, perhaps in a few hours, loaded with conscious painful being,
counting the tardy pace of the lingering moments by the repercussions
of anguish, and refusing or denied a comforter. Day follows night, and
night comes after day, only to curse him with life which gives him no
pleasure; and yet the awful, dark termination of that life is
something at which he recoils.

"Tell us, ye dead; will none of you in pity
Disclose the secret -------------------
_What 'tis you are, and we must shortly be?_
------------------------ 'tis no matter:
A little time will make us learn'd as you are."[194]

Can it be possible, that when I resign this frail, feverish being, I
shall still find myself in conscious existence? When the last gasp of
agony has announced that I am no more to those that knew me, and the
few who loved me; when the cold, stiffened, unconscious, ghastly corse
is resigned into the earth, to be the prey of unsightly reptiles, and
to become in time a trodden clod, shall I be yet warm in life, seeing
and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable sages and holy flamens,
is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories, of
another world beyond death; or are they all alike, baseless visions,
and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must be only for
the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane; what a
flattering idea, then, is a world to come! Would to God I as firmly
believed it, as I ardently wish it! There I should meet an aged
parent, now at rest from the many buffetings of an evil world, against
whic