Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/170

Rh hours, wine, and personal excess have stranded them midway of life's sea; the Nerve fountains are run dry; vital energy is sapped and gone; and existence is dull, feverish, wholly spiceless, and insipid. A Third class have led such fretful, vexed, and troubled lives that, without intentional error, they have nearly extinguished the fire of life. A Fourth class, embracing both sexes and all ages, from ten years to threescore, consists of those unfortunates who, by neglect or other causes, have become inverted, and by solitary habits (not to be mentioned, but whose terrific consequences must be met and conquered), have sapped and drained their vitality, till their flesh is waxy, nerves unstrung, brain softened: they have become unreliable, changeful, angular, crooked, wild, shiftless, aimless, suspicious, lonely, nervous; easily affected by the weather, bad news; are gloomy, morose, scary, discontented, dreamy, fidgety, suicidal, secretive; now tender, then coarse and callous; now gentle, then the opposite; vapory, fretful, easily worried; wholly unfitted for life's most solemn duties; disquieted themselves, and estranging their best friends; they have become worn out, exhausted, and, in the case of females, loaded down with troubles that would kill half the men living; often, in their cases, resulting in morbid state of mind and body; and in men resulting in Impotence, and worse trouble. There is a Fifth class, whom Disease has wasted and reduced so that there is scarcely life enough to make it at all desirable; and a morbid melancholy, almost utter despair, follows. They have frighful dreams, flashes, headaches, palpitations, anger fits, hysteria, and angularities without number. A Sixth class have gone to waste, impotence, and senility, at 30, 35, and 40 years of age, who with a little care could retain full vigor till threescore years and ten!

The above list embraces, 1st. All that vast mass of people who are exhausted by mental labor and sedentary occupations; who from various causes arc angular, excitable, nervous, and, at times. unaccountably morbid; 2d. All who are passionless, cold, non-attractive, non-attracted, or, if attracted, hopelessly so, from lack of responsive ability; who are unsettled, uneasy, subject to mental, temperamental, gloomy, lonely, and passional storms; 3d. All