de
every step, and threaten to rise and overwhelm one.

The poetic and artistic temperament is peculiarly susceptible to this
form of trial. In work of an industrial or mechanical nature, a certain
degree of will force alone will serve to insure its accomplishment
whether one "feels in the mood" or not. The mood does not greatly
count. But in work of any creative sort, the mood, the condition of
mind, is the determining factor. And is it within human power, by force
of will alone, to call up this working mood of radiant energy when all
energy has ebbed away, leaving one as inert as an electric machine from
which the current has been turned off?

And yet--and yet--the saving gift and grace of life and achievement
comes, in that there is a power higher than one's own will, on which one
may lay hold with this serene and steadfast fidelity.

Physicians and scientists have long since recognized that intense mental
depression is as inevitably an accompaniment of _la grippe_ as are its
physical symptoms, and the more fully the patient himself understands
this, and is thus enabled to look at it objectively, so to speak, the
better it is for him. The feeling is that he has not a friend on earth,
and, on the whole, he is rather glad of it. He feels as if it were much
easier to die than to live,--not to say that the former presents itself
to him as far the preferable course. So he envelops himself in the
black shadows of gloom, and, on the whole, quite prefers drawing them
constantly deeper. And this is very largely the semi-irresponsible state
of illness combined with ignorance of the real nature of the malady.

The knowledge of how to meet it with a degree of that "sweet
reasonableness" which should invest one's daily living, is knowledge
that can hardly come amiss. One must treat it as a transient visitation
of those

"Black spirits or white, blue spirits or gray,"

which are to be exorcised by keeping close to beautiful thought,--to
something high, poetic, reverent. "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace
whose mind is stayed on Thee" is one of the most practical aids in life.
It can be relied upon more fully than the visit of the physician. From
the Bible, from the poets, one may draw as from a sustaining fountain.
As this intense depression is a mental feature of the disease it must be
met by mental methods,--of resolutely holding the thoughts to high and
beautiful themes; by allying the imagination with serene and radi