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A PRETTY severe fit of indisposition which, uhe name of a nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is but slowly leaving me, has reduced me to an incapacity of refleg upon any topic fn to itself. Expeo healthy clusions from me this month, reader; I offer you only sick mens dreams.And truly the whole state of siess is such; for what else is it but a magnifit dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw day-light curtains about him; and, shutting out the sun, to iotal oblivion of all the works which are going on u? To bee insensible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one feeble pulse?
If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient lords, it there! what caprices he acts without troul! how king like he sways his pillow tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and l, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever varying requisitions of his throbbing temples.
He ges sides oftehan a politi. Now he lies full length, then halflength, obliquely, transversely, head a quite across the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum.
How siess enlarges the dimensions of a mao himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only<big></big> duty. `Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to get well. asses out of doors, or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not.
A little while ago he was greatly ed in the event of a law-suit, which was to be the making or the marring of his dearest friend. He was to be seen trudging about upon this mans errand to fifty quarters of the town at once, jogging this witness, refreshing that solicitor. The cause was to e oerday. He is absolutely as indifferent to the decision, as if it were a question to be tried at Pekin. Peradventure from some whispering, going on about the house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him uand, that things went cross-grained in the Court yesterday, and his friend is ruined. But the word "friend," and the word "ruin," disturb him no more than so much jargon. He is not to think of any thing but how to get better.
What a world of fn cares are merged in that abs sideration!
He has put orong armour of siess, he is ed in the callous hide of suffering; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious vintage, urusty lod key, for his own use only.
He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he yearh over himself; his bowels are eveed within him, to think what he suffers; he is not ashamed to weep over himself.
He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself; studying little stratagems and ar<q></q>tificial alleviations.
He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allowable fi, into as many distindividuals, as he hath sore and sorrowing members. Sometimes he meditates -- as of a thing apart from him -- upon his poor ag head, and that dull pain which, dozing or waking, lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpable substance of pain, not to he removed without opening the very scull, as it seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated fingers. He passionates himself all over; and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, and ９9lｉb.ender heart.
He is his own sympathiser; and instinctively feels that none so well perform that office for him. He cares for few spectators to his tragedy. Only that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that announces his broths, and his cordials. He likes it because it is so unmoved, and because he pour forth his feverish ejaculations before it as unreservedly as to his bed-post.
To the worlds business he is dead. He uands not what the callings and occupations of mortals are; only he has a glimmering ceit of some such thing, when the doakes his daily call: and even in the lines of that busy face he reads no multiplicity of patients, but solely ceives of himself as the sick man. To what other uneasy couch the good man is hastening, when he slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so carefully for fear of rustling -- is no speculation which he at preseertaihinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same hour to-morrow.
Household rumours touch him not. Some faint murmur, indicative of life going on within the house, soothes him, while he knows not distinctly what it is. He is not to know any thing, not to think of any thing. Servants gliding up or down the distant staircase, treading as upo, gently keep his ear awake, so long as he troubles not himself further than with some feeble guess at their errands. Exacter knowledge would be a burthen to him: he just ehe pressure of jecture. He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke of the muffled knocker, and closes it again without asking "who was it?" He is flattered by a general notion that inquiries are making after him, but he cares not to know the name of the inquirer. In the general stillness, and awful hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels his snty.
To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. pare the silent tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which he is served -- with the careless demeanour, the unceremonious goings in and out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the very same attendants, when he is getting a little better -- and you will fess, that from the bed of siess (thro me rather call it) to the elbow chair of valesce, is a fall from dignity, amounting to a deposition.
How valesce shrinks a man back to his pristiature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the familys eye? The se of his regalities, his si, which was his presence chamber, where he lay and acted his despoticies -- how is it reduced to a on bed-room! The trimness of the very bed has somethiy and unmeaning about it. It is mad, every day. How uo that wavy, many-furrowed, oic surface, which <s>藏书网</s>it presented so short a time since, when to make it was a serviot to be thought of at oftehan three or four day revolutions, wheient was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to the enents of unwele ness, and decies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be lifted into it again, for ahree or four days respite, to flou out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was a historical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled coverlid.
Hushed are those mysterious sighs -- those groans -- so much more awful, while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quehe riddle of siess is solved; and Philoctetes is bee an ordinary personage.
Perhaps some relic of the sick mans dream of greatness survives iill lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how is he too ged with every thing else! this be he -- this man of news -- of chat -- of ae -- of every thing but physi this be he, who so lately came betweeient and his cruel enemy, as on some solemn embassy from Nature, ereg herself into a high mediating party ? -- Pshaw! `tis some old woman.
Farewell with him all that made siess pompous -- the spell that hushed the household -- the desart-like stillness, felt throughout its inmost chambers -- the mute attendance -- the inquiry by looks -- the still softer delicacies of self-attention -- the sole and single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon itself -- world-thoughts excluded -- the man a world unto himself -- his owre --
What a speck is he dwindled into !
In this flat s of valesce, left by the ebb of siess, yet far enough from the terra firma of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting -- an article. In Artiortis, thought I; but it is something hard -- and the quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me. The summons, unseasonable as it appeared, seemed to link me on again to the petty businesses of life, which I had lost sight of; a gentle call to activity, however trivial a wholesome weaning from that preposterous dream of self-absorption -- the puffy state of siess -- in which I fess to have lain so long, insensible to the magazines and monarchies, of the world alike; to its laws, and to its literature. The hypodriac afflatus is subsiding; the acres, whi imagination I had spread over -- for the sick man swells in the sole plation of his single sufferings, till he bees a Tityus to himself -- are wasting to a span; and for the giant of self-importance, which I was so lately, yo></a>u have me once again in my natural pretensions -- the lean and meagre figure of your insignifit Essayist.
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