her has made
for himself a living spirit. It is a fair occasion for self-complacency,
I repeat, when the event shows a man to have chosen the better part, and
laid out his life more wisely, in the long run, than those who have
credit for most wisdom. And yet even this is not a good unmixed; and,
like all other possessions, although in a less degree, the possession of
a brain that has been thus improved and cultivated, and made into the
prime organ of a man's enjoyment, brings with it certain inevitable
cares and disappointments. The happiness of such an one comes to depend
greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten and harmonise
the coarser elements of beauty. And thus a degree of nervous
prostration, that to other men would be hardly disagreeable, is enough
to overthrow for him the whole fabric of his life, to take, except at
rare moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him wherever he
goes with failure, and the sense of want, and disenchantment of the
world and life.

It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the life of the invalid
resembles a premature old age. Those excursions that he had promised
himself to finish prove too long or too arduous for his feeble body; and
the barrier-hills are as impassable as ever. Many a white town that sits
far out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the
mountain-side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is
yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds.
The sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully; and after some
feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days, he
falls contentedly in with the restrictions of his weakness. His narrow
round becomes pleasant and familiar to him as the cell to a contented
prisoner. Just as he has fallen already out of the mid race of active
life, he now falls out of the little eddy that circulates in the shallow
waters of the sanatorium. He sees the country people come and go about
their everyday affairs, the foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure
parties; the stir of man's activity is all about him, as he suns himself
inertly in some sheltered corner; and he looks on with a patriarchal
impersonality of interest, such as a man may feel when he pictures to
himself the fortunes of his remote descendants, or the robust old age of
the oak he has planted over-night.

In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of other men,
there is no