Oh! there is a dream of hoary age,
    ’Tis a vision of gold in store—­
  Of sums noted down on the figured page,
    To be counted o’er and o’er: 
  And we fondly trust in our glittering dust,
    As a refuge from grief and pain,
  Till our limbs are laid on that last dark bed,
    Where the wealth of the world is vain.

  And is it thus, from man’s birth to his grave—­
    In the path which all are treading? 
  Is there naught in that long career to save
    From remorse and self-upbraiding? 
  O yes, there’s a dream so pure, so bright,
    That the being to whom it is given,
  Hath bathed in a sea of living light—­
    And the theme of that dream is Heaven.

* * * * *

THE LECTURER

* * * * *

AN EXCERP FROM ABERNETHY’S LECTURES.

When I was speaking of the cure of the digestive organs, I spoke of stomachic irritation, and said it was occasioned by some morbid peculiarity.  It is difficult to find out the exigents; it must be done by experiment.  We give a medicine, it answers.  The digestive organs have such a sympathy with contiguous organs, that no wonder if such contiguous organs are affected.  The liver, for instance, cannot perform its office aright if the bowels are uncomfortable.  Violent drastics are wrong, they do not do good; you cannot go on giving physic every day, this will teaze the bowels and not tranquilize them, The cure is to repeat the excitement of progressive action.  People in general will not find out that what may be an adequate excitement one day, may not be an adequate excitement on another day.  As to these things, they are easily managed, and you should attend to them.  Every person advanced in life knows this, and attends to it.  Doctor Curry, whom I used to call the poetical doctor, says, very justly, “It is in medicine as it is in morals, you must break bad habits, and establish good ones.”

Where the liver is primarily affected, small doses of quicksilver act in a wonderful and a prodigious manner.  How the stomach, when wrong, disturbs the head, is apparent to every one.  How a faulty action of the liver disturbs the head is also well known; but the liver, in an especial manner, disturbs the head.

A Yorkshireman came three hundred miles, as he told me, on purpose to see me, and he said he was going back again by the mail the same night.  I asked him what could induce him to come so far.  His reply was, “Why you once set up a friend of mine, and I thought you could set me up too.”

I would have you keep your eyes open to this, that we are perpetually putting wrong our digestive organs by our absurdities in diet.  These organs, if long wrong, will affect the spinal chord, producing lumbar numbness.  Now, then, I have surveyed the influence of local maladies in disturbing the nervous energies, and now I say there is a reflected action in them, and they become a fruitful source of a numerous and dissimilar progeny of local diseases.