A PRETTY severe fit of indisposition which, uhe name of a nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is but slowly leaving me, has reduced me to an incapacity of refleg upon any topic fn to itself. Expeo healthy clusions from me this month, reader; I offer you only sick mens dreams.
And truly the whole state of siess is such; for what else is it but a magnifit dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw day-light curtains about him; and, shutting out the sun, to iotal oblivion of all the works which are going on u? To bee insensible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one feeble pulse?
If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient lords, it there! what caprices he acts without troul! how king like he sways his pillow tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and l, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever varying requisitions of his throbbing temples.
He ges sides oftehan a politi. Now he lies full length, then halflength, obliquely, transversely, head a quite across the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum.
How siess enlarges the dimensions of a mao himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty. `Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to get well. asses out of doors, or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not.
A little while ago he was greatly ed in the event of a law-suit, which was to be the making or the marring of his dearest friend. He was to be seen trudging about upon this mans errand to fifty quarters of the town at once, jogging this witness, refreshing that solicitor. The cause was to e oerday. He is absolutely as indifferent to the decision, as if it were a question to be tried at Pekin. Peradventure from some whispering, going on about the house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him uand, that things went cross-grained in the Court yesterday, and his friend is ruined. But the word "friend," and the word "ruin," disturb him no more than so much jargon. He is not to think of any thing but how to get better.
What a world of fn cares are merged in that abs sideration!
He has put orong armour of siess, he is ed in the callous hide of suffering; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious vintage, urusty lod key, for his own use only.
He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he yearh over himself; his bowels are eveed within him, to think what he suffers; he is not ashamed to weep over himself.
He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself; studying little stratagems and artificial alleviations.
He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allowable fi, into as many distindividuals, as he hath sore and sorrowing members. Sometimes he meditates -- as of a thing apart from him -- upon his poor ag head, and that dull pain which, dozing or waking, lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpable substance of pain, not to he removed without opening the very scull, as it seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated fingers. He passionates himself all over; and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, and tender heart.
He is his own sympathiser; and instinctively feels that none so well perform that office for him. He cares for few spe