may go as they will.

"Our hands in one, we will not shrink
From life's severest due;
Our hands in one, we will not blink
The terrible and true."

And sometimes one bounds to the other side of sensation,--has a terrible
rubbed-the-wrong-wayedness, and is as much alive as Mimosa herself. This
is often on those easterly days which all well-regulated invalids
shudder at, when the very marrow congeals and the nerves are
sharp-whetted. Then, Prometheus-like, one "gnaws the heart with
meditation"; then, too, always fall out various domestic disasters, and
it is not easy to see why the curtain-string should be tied in a hard
knot that must be cut at night, or why the servants can't be thorough,
deft-handed, and immaculate. One has indigestion, scowls fiercely, tries
to swallow large lumps of inamiability, and fears she is not sublime.

It is a saying of Jean Paul, that "the most painful part of corporeal
pain is the uncorporeal, namely, our impatience and disappointment that
it continues." Whether this be true or not, what with the worry and
constant pressure, these physical disabilities often appear to sink into
the deepest centre of the being. Hence, if one have had a cough for a
very long time, it would seem that the soul must keep on coughing in the
next world. If so, this gives a subtile sense to the despatches of
departed spiritualists, who telegraph back in a few weeks that their
pain is _nearly_ gone,--as if the soul were not immediately rid of the
bad habits of the body.

But most demoralized in aesthetic sense must be that invalid who does not
constantly look to the splendid robustness of health. Sickness has been
termed an early old age; far worse, it is often a tossing nightmare in
which the noble ideal of fairer days is only recalled with reproachful
pain. Towards this vision of vigor the victim seems to move and move,
but never draw near. Well might Heine weep, even before the stricken
Lady of Milo. An old proverb says, that "the gods have health in
essence, sickness only in intelligence." Blessed are the gods! One can
quite understand the reckless exulting of some wild character, who,
baffled with this miserable mendicancy everywhere, at length discovered
the idea that God was not an invalid. He was probably too much excited
to perfect his rhyme, and so tore out these ragged lines:--

"Iterate, iterate,
Snatch it from the hells,
Circulate and meditate
That God is