To be laid up in bed for a
month with a violent disease is nothing. You are killed or cured; made
better, and your illness forgotten even by yourself; or quietly laid
under the dust of your mother earth, to lie there in oblivion, the busy
world moving on, unheeding, over your cold remains, till the great day
of judgment. But to have, as it were, your whole 'mind, body, soul, and
strength' turned, with a resistless fascination, into the frightened
study of your own dreadful anatomy. To find your courage quail, not
before real danger, but at phantoms and shadows--nay, actually at your
own horrid self--to feel every act of life and every moment of business
a task, an effort, a trial, and a pain. 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.
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