her feet I lay
long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied me. The goddess
looked compassionately on me, but at the same time disconsolately, as if
she would say, 'Dost thou not see that I have no arms, and thus cannot
help thee?'"

Not less touching was the pathos of Tom Hood, in his long years of
consumption; but the tone was gayer than the gayest. See him write to a
friend: "My dear Johnny, aren't you glad to hear now that I've only been
ill and spitting blood three times since I left you, instead of being
very dead indeed?" To this he adds: "But wasn't I in luck, after
spitting blood and being bled, to catch the rheumatism in going down
stairs!"

One long struggle was his against prostration and over-work; but always
the same buoyant wit,--writing the cheeriest things with an ebbing life;
the hero fighting against fatal odds, but always under a light
mask,--and ridiculing himself most of all;--

"I'm sick of gruel and the dietetics;
I'm sick of pills and sicker of emetics;
I'm sick of pulse's tardiness or quickness;
I'm sick of blood, its thinness or its thickness;
In short, within a word, I'm sick of sickness."

And others there be, not heroes, who yet have simulated heroism in their
blithe indifference to fate;--Lord Buckhurst, who is said to have
"stuttered more wit in dying than most people have in their best
health"; Wycherley, who took a young bride just before death, and was
"neither afraid of dying nor ashamed of marrying"; Chesterfield, who in
his last days, when going out for a London drive, used smilingly to say,
"I must go and rehearse my funeral"; Pope, who was the victim of
incessant disease, which yet never subdued his rhetoric; Scarron, a
paralytic and a monstrosity, the merriest man in France, for whom the
nation never gave any tears but those of laughter;--all these, down to
the easy-minded old Dr. Garth, who died simply because he was tired of
life,--"tired of having his shoes pulled on and off."

Strong persons go swinging securely up and down; they are the people of
affairs, their nerves are not shaken by anything less than cholera
reports; saving these, they should belong to the Great Unterrified of
the earth. To them it is hardly given to understand those minute
annoyances that beset nerves which are in an abnormal state, especially
when one is the prisoner of a single room. Then one is eternally busy
with the dust and small disorders around,--the film o