s difference,
that my remembered experiences, now invested with a species of borrowed
light, seem like scenery which one has seen in the glance of a mid-day sun,
presented again to the dreamy "evening sense" under the soft blue
effulgence of the waning harvest-moon; the trees with the sere leaf
rustling under the fluttering wing of the night bird; and the dead silence,
which is not broken by the internal voice speaking the words that have been
spoken by those who lie under the yew tree. In an early leaf of my journal,
I find some broken details of a visit I paid to Mr B----, a rich
manufacturer in the town where I began my practice; but which I left when I
had more confidence in those humble powers of ministering to the afflicted,
which have raised me to an honourable station, and supplied me with the
means of passing my old age in affluence. This individual had lost his
wife--a very amiable woman, with whom he had lived a period of twenty-five
years--and took on grief so heavily, that he was unfit to attend the
funeral. He lay in bed, and would not be comforted. Having attended his
wife, I continued my attentions to the husband. Three days had passed since
his wife had been buried, and during all that time, he had eaten nothing;
and, what augured gloomily for his fate, he had never been heard to speak,
or sigh, or even to give vent to his sufferings in a single groan. There
seemed to have fallen over him a heavy load, which, pressing with deadly
force upon the issues of life, defied those reacting energies of nature,
which usually struggle, by sighs and groans, to throw off the incubus of
extraordinary griefs.

I have met with many wiseacre-sceptics who laugh at the idea of what is
vulgarly called a "broken heart," as a direct consequence either of
unrequited love or extraordinary grief--admitting, however, in their
liberality, that death may ensue from great griefs operating merely as an
inductive original cause, which destroying gradually the foundations of
health, bring on a train of other ailments, that may, in the end, prove
mortal. The admission cares for nothing, as a matter of every-day
experience; and the original proposition to which it is objected as a
qualification, remains as a truth which may humble the pride of man, and
speak to the sceptic through the crushed heart of a fatal experience. I
have seen many instances of the fatal effects of grief as a direct mortal
agent, killing, by its own unaided energie