, "Is anything too hard for God? It
is now eleven years since I have felt such a thing as weariness." And he
continued till eighty-eight in full possession of his faculties,
laboring with body and mind alike to within a week of his death.

Joseph Priestley was certainly a very different man, but scarcely less
remarkable. No mean student in all branches of literature, a
metaphysician, a theologian, a man of science, he began life with a
feeble frame, and ended a hearty old age at seventy-one. He himself
declares at fifty-four, that, "so far from suffering from application to
study, I have found my health steadily improve from the age of eighteen
to the present time."

You would scarcely find a life more widely divided from these than that
of Washington Irving. Nevertheless, it is like them in one respect, that
it bears emphatic testimony to the real healthiness of mental exertion.
He was the feeblest of striplings at eighteen. At nineteen, Judge Kent
said, "He is not long for this world." His friends sent him abroad at
twenty-one, to see if a sea voyage would not husband his strength. So
pale, so broken, was he, that, when he stepped on board the ship, the
captain whispered, "There is a chap who will be overboard before we are
across!" Irving had, too, his share of misfortunes,--failure in
business, loss of investments, in earlier life some anxiety as to the
ways and means of support. Even his habits of study were hardly what the
highest wisdom would direct. While he was always genial and social, and
at times easy almost to indolence, when the mood seized him, he would
write incessantly for weeks and even for months, sometimes fourteen,
fifteen, or sixteen hours in a day. But he grew robust for half a
century, and writes, at seventy-five, that he has now "a streak of old
age."

* * * * *

The example of some of those who are said to have been worn out by
intense mental application furnishes perhaps the most convincing proof
of all that no reasonable activity of the mind ever warred with the best
health of the body. Walter Scott, we are told, wore out. And very
likely, to a certain extent, the statement is true. But what had he not
accomplished before he wore out? He had astonished the world with that
wonderful series of romances which place him scarcely second to any name
in English literature. He had sung those border legends which delighted
the ears of his generation. He had produced