Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 2.djvu/587

 with such productions. His correspondence was extensive, but when he wrote a letter, he soon quitted light subjects, and detailed the more important thoughts with which his labouring breast was filled. His mind was never vacant, or in a state to be pleased or even amused with trifles. The labour which he. voluntarily underwent every day, was, in reality, too much for his physical powers. At one time he tried to rouse his jaded faculties by wine, although the most temperate of mea, and one whom wine never elated; then abandoning the use of wine entirely, or nearly so, he had recourse to coffee, of which he would sometimes partake immoderately. Thus he persevered in a determination to do, by some means or other, a certain quantity of work, for which natural strength was denied him; and no exhortations of his friends, no persuasions, could produce in his mind any conviction of the important fact, that to do what he was determined to do, could not be done with health preserved, and that what he needed, far more than any stimulants, was some rest, some cessation from toil, some tranquil time in which the composure and the strength of his nervous system might be, to a certain extent, regained. But he felt and expressed this conviction to me when it was quite too late to profit by it.

In fact, he had struggled against his warning feelings for years. He remarked, in the last conversation he was capable of holding with me, only six days before his death, that if he had taken some rest and relaxation two years before, he should not have been brought into the debilitated state in which he found himself. But even nine years before, he