d for the world which we know, by
unsolicited visitations from worlds into which every glimpse is soon
lost amid shadows. And it amazes us to think how soon such incidents,
though not actually forgotten, though they can be recalled--and recalled
too vividly for health--at our will, are nevertheless thrust, as it
were, out of the mind's sight as we cast into lumber-rooms the crutches
and splints that remind us of a broken limb which has recovered its
strength and tone. It is a felicitous peculiarity in our organization,
which all members of my profession will have noticed, how soon, when
a bodily pain is once passed, it becomes erased from the
recollection,--how soon and how invariably the mind refuses to linger
over and recall it. No man freed an hour before from a raging toothache,
the rack of a neuralgia, seats himself in his armchair to recollect and
ponder upon the anguish he has undergone. It is the same with certain
afflictions of the mind,--not with those that strike on our affections,
or blast our fortunes, overshadowing our whole future with a sense of
loss; but where a trouble or calamity has been an accident, an episode
in our wonted life, where it affects ourselves alone, where it is
attended with a sense of shame and humiliation, where the pain
of recalling it seems idle, and if indulged would almost madden
us,--agonies of that kind we do not brood over as we do over the death
or falsehood of beloved friends, or the train of events by which we are
reduced from wealth to penury. No one, for instance, who has escaped
from a shipwreck, from the brink of a precipice, from the jaws of
a tiger, spends his days and nights in reviving his terrors past,
re-imagining dangers not to occur again, or, if they do occur, from
which the experience undergone can suggest no additional safeguards. The
current of our life, indeed, like that of the rivers, is most rapid in
the midmost channel, where all streams are alike comparatively slow in
the depth and along the shores in which each life, as each river, has a
character peculiar to itself. And hence, those who would sail with the
tide of the world, as those who sail with the tide of a river, hasten
to take the middle of the stream, as those who sail against the tide
are found clinging to the shore. I returned to my habitual duties and
avocations with renewed energy; I did not suffer my thoughts to dwell on
the dreary wonders that had haunted me, from the evening I first met
S