Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/372

368 system of recognition and care more intelligent, much more devoted had been employed, so much more good could have been done, let the conventional veil of sacred personality be removed from the very beginnings of the letter, and thus complete the picture as contained in its entirety: "I can only thank you," she begins, "for all your generous thoughts and deeds." Carlyle's remorse at his meager treatment of his "poor Jeanie" comes deprecatingly to mind as one now reads this again. "You are say-well and do-well bound in one frame."—What one ought to have been and done, rather. "Your Christmas book came; it was full of words of comfort. I have written to you in thought many times; it requires heroic effort to make it real. The lovely flowers spoke of you many days after you were here. It will soon be time to think of your coining again—always good to see you, and have your presence."

Unquestionably this is too personal to be published except for one reason—the immeasurable reason for calling attention anew, and with all the emphasis possible, to the need of a more universal recognition of the thickly peopled realm of psychalgia—the mentally anguished, the sick-of-soul—as well as to the never-lessening need there is of finding ways and means for more successful amelioration of such suffering, and of applying these with an efficiency heretofore unattempted. How often has one in the presence of this unique sufferer, as has been the case in the presence of many another less distinctive, felt an utter unpreparedness for rendering the relief which instinctively one has felt to be needed. Yet note how she understood, magnified and appreciated what little one did attempt. Could one have been intelligent enough, skillful enough, sympathetic enough, and could those in more immediate association with her have been similarly endowed and prepared, what indeed might not have been done to relieve, if not the bodily suffering then the mind and heart suffering, which was ever so present and so insulting.