Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/97

92 not always either in mood or condition to lavish tenderness even upon the children of his loins, or the wife of his bosom, all of whom he loves beyond his then-capacity of expression. A person in certain physical states is insane for the time being; is fully willing to curse God, and die; yet a dose of opening medicine would unbar the gates of his soul, and within two hours that self-same man would bless God, and live.

And a wife in certain magnetic and mental states, the result of physiological causes, would fly at a man and scratch his eyes out, when, next day, after a good dose of senna, she would love and caress him half to death.

At this writing I am suffering from partial paralysis, partly the result of a severe fall,—a mere matter of twenty-five feet through the trestle-work of a bridge, upon a not very soft pile of rocks at the bottom, sent down there by the savage threats of two converging locomotives, one behind and one before. But that injury I could have recovered from, by reason of the strong resilient energies of my constitution, had it not happened that for months before, then, and months afterward, I was continually laboring with brain, hands, and pen,—bad enough,—but was also subjected daily to violent and continued affectional and mental emotion; cause: "A woman at the bottom of it;" and that sort of excitement is quite sufficient to bring on paralysis, without the help of any locomotive that ever screeched over the "Middle Ground,"—a place in Toledo, where more ghosts of mangled dead walk than upon any surface of equal area in the entire universe.

As physician, I have treated many cases of disease which the patients attributed to scores of causes other than the right one,—affectional trouble. Merchants, bankers, men of large business, are almost invariably, and inevitably, stricken down in the midst of life and hope, by apoplexy, paralysis, chronic dyspepsia, stone, gravel, or embolism; not alone by reason of their business activity, or even nervous exhaustion, but because they do no not loosen up, change their modes of motion, and devote more time to the homeside, social life, and "fun." Business, the infernal demon-god, is all in all; passion but a spasm; love, a myth, an unrealized dream,