Sometimes To Be Unable To Sleep
For A Week - Sometimes To Sleep, But, At The Dead Of Night, To Wake,
Your bed shaking under you from the violent palpitation of your heart,
and your pillow drenched with cold sweat pouring
From you in streams.
But, worst of all, if you are of a stubborn, dogged, temper, and are
blessed with a strong desire to 'get on' - to feel yourself unable to
make some efforts at all, to find yourself breaking down before all the
world in others, and to learn, at last, in consequence, almost to hate
the half-dead and failing carcase tied to your still living will. This,
not for months only, but for YEARS. Years, too, in what ought to be
your prime of manhood. Ah! old age and incapacity at thirty is a
bitter, bitter punishment. Better be dead than suffer it; for you must
suffer it alone and in silence - you may not hope for sympathy - you dare
not desire it - you see no prospect of relief - you wage a double
warfare, with the world and with yourself. I do not, I dare not,
exaggerate. Indeed, a lady of a certain age could hardly feel more
abashed at the sudden production of her baptismal certificate than I - a
man, a matter-of-fact man, a plain, hard-headed, unimaginative man of
business - do, at this confession. Suffice it to say, that in the last
four years I have lived the life of a soul in purgatory or an
inhabitant of the 'Inferno,' and though I have worked like a horse,
determined, if possible, to rout out my evil genii - the wave of health
has gradually receded, till, at last, an internal voice has seemed
solemnly to say, 'Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.'
"If any one, who has not suffered similarly, has patience to read thus
far (which is doubtful), before now he has said, with Mr. Burchell in
the 'Vicar of Wakefield' - 'FUDGE.' No matter - I should have so
exclaimed once; and I now envy him his healthy ignorance.
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