the patient was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to the encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and decencies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be lifted into it again, for another three or four days’ respite, to flounder it out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was a historical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled coverlid.

Hushed are those mysterious sighs—­those groans—­so much more awful, while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded.  The Lernean pangs are quenched.  The riddle of sickness is solved; and Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage.

Perhaps some relic of the sick man’s dream of greatness survives in the still lingering visitations of the medical attendant.  But how is he too changed with everything else!  Can this be he—­this man of news—­of chat—­of anecdote—­of every thing but physic—­can this be he, who so lately came between the patient and his cruel enemy, as on some solemn embassy from Nature, erecting herself into a high mediating party?  Pshaw!’tis some old woman.

Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous—­the spell that hushed the household—­the desart-like stillness, felt throughout its inmost chambers—­the mute attendance—­the inquiry by looks—­the still softer delicacies of self-attention—­the sole and single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon itself—­world-thoughts excluded—­the man a world unto himself—­his own theatre—­

  What a speck is he dwindled into!

In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far enough from the terra firma of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting—­an article.  In Articulo Mortis, thought I; but it is something hard—­and the quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me.  The summons, unseasonable as it appeared, seemed to link me on again to the petty businesses of life, which I had lost sight of; a gentle call to activity, however trivial; a wholesome weaning from that preposterous dream of self-absorption—­the puffy state of sickness—­in which I confess to have lain so long, insensible to the magazines and monarchies, of the world alike; to its laws, and to its literature.  The hypochondriac flatus is subsiding; the acres, which in imagination I had spread over—­for the sick man swells in the sole contemplation of his single sufferings, till he becomes a Tityus to himself—­are wasting to a span; and for the giant of self-importance, which I was so lately, you have me once again in my natural pretensions—­the lean and meagre figure of your insignificant Essayist.

SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS