What human creature in the dead of night Had coursed like hunted hare that cruel distance? Had sought the door, the window in his flight, Striving for dear existence ? What shrieking spirit in that bloody room Across the sunbeam, and along the wall, O'er all there hung the shadow of a fear, LIFE IN THE SICK ROOM.* Of all the know-nothing persons in this world, commend us to the man who has "never known a day's illness." He is a moral dunce; one who has lost the greatest lesson in life; who has skipped the finest lecture in that great school of humanity, the Sick Chamber. Let him be versed in mathematics, profound in metaphysics, a ripe scholar in the classics, a bachelor of arts, or even a doctor in divinity, yet is he as one of those gentlemen whose education has been neglected. For all his college acquirements, how inferior is he in wholesome knowledge to the mortal who has had but a quarter's gout, or a half-year of ague -how infinitely below the fellow-creature who has been soundly taught his tic-douloureux, thoroughly grounded in the rheumatics, and deeply red in the scarlet fever! And yet, what is more common than to hear a great hulking, florid fellow, bragging of an ignorance, a brutal ignorance, that he shares in common with the pig and the bullock, the generality of which die, probably, without ever having experienced a day's indisposition? To such a monster of health the volume before us will be a sealed book; for how can he appreciate its allusions to physical suffering, whose bodily annoyance has never reached beyond a slight tickling of the epidermis, or the tingling of a foot gone to sleep? How should he, who has sailed through life with a clean bill of health, be able to sympathize with the feelings, or the quiet sayings and doings, of an invalid condemned to a lifelong quarantine in his chamber? What should he know of Life in the Sick Room? As little as our poor paralytic grandmother knows of Life in London. *Life in the Sick Room. By an Invalid. Moxon. With ourselves it is otherwise. Afflicted for twenty years with a complication of disorders, the least of which is elephantiasis-bedridden on the broad of our back till it became narrow-and then confined to our chamber as rigidly as if it had been a cell in the Pentonville Penitentiary-we are in a fit state, body and mind, to appreciate such a production as Mr. Moxon -not the Effervescing Magnesian, but the worthy publisherhas forwarded with so much sagacity, or instinct, to our own sick ward. The very book for us! if, indeed, we are not actually the Anonymous of its dedication-the very fellow-sufferer on whose sympathy-" confidently reckoned on though unasked," the Invalid author so implicitly relies. We certainly do sympathize most profoundly; and as certainly we are a great sufferer, the greatest, perhaps, in England, except the poor incurable man who is always being cured by Holloway's Ointment. Enough of ourselves:-and now for the book. The first thing that struck us, on the perusal, was a very judicious omission. Most writers on such a topic as the sick-room would have begun by recommending some pet doctor, or favorite remedy for all diseases; whereas the author has preferred to advise on the selection of an eligible retreat for laying up for life, and especially of a window towards that good aspect, the face of Nature. And truly, a long term of infirm health is such a very bad look out, as to require some better prospect elsewhere. For, not to mention a church-yard, or a dead wall, what can be worse for a sick prisoner, than to pass year after year in some dull street, contemplating some dull house, never new-fronted, or even insured in a new fire-office, to add a new plate to the two old ones under the middle window ? What more dreadful than to be driven by the monotony outside to the sameness within, till the very figures of the chintz curtain are daguerreotyped on the brain, or the head seems lined with a paper of the same pattern as the one on the wall? How much better, for soul and body, for the invalid to gaze on such a picture as this: -- "Between my window and the sea is a green down, as green as any field in Ireland; and on the nearer half of this down, haymaking goes forward in its season. It slopes down to a hollow, where the prior of old preserved his fish, there being sluices formerly at either end, the one opening upon the river, and the other upon the little haven below the priory, whose ruins still crown the rock. From the prior's fish-pond, the green down slopes upwards again to a ridge; and on the slope are cows grazing all summer, and half way into the winter. Over the ridge, I survey the harbor and all its traffic, the view extending from the light-houses far to the right, to a horizon of sea to the left. Beyond the harbor lies another county, with, first, its sandy beach, where there are frequent wrecks-too interesting to an invalid-and a fine stretch of rocky shore to the left; and above the rocks, a spreading heath, where I watch troops of boys flying their kites; lovers and friends taking their breezy walk on Sundays; the sportsman with his gun and dog; and the washerwomen converging from the farmhouses on Saturday evenings, to carry their loads, in company, to the village on the yet further height. I see them, now talking in a cluster, as they walk each with her white burden on her head, and now in file, as they pass through the narrow lane; and finally they part off on the village green, each to some neighboring house of the gentry. Behind the village and the heath, stretches the railroad; and I watch the train triumphantly careering along the level road, and puffing forth its steam above hedges and groups of trees, and then laboring and panting up the ascent, till it is lost between two heights, which at last bound my view. But on these heights are more objects; a windmill now in motion and now at rest; a lime-kiln, in a picturesque rocky field; an ancient church tower, barely visible in the morning, but conspicuous when the setting sun shines upon it; a colliery, with its lofty wagon-way, and the self-moving wagons running hither and thither, as if in pure wilfulness; and three or four farms, at various degrees of ascent, whose yards, paddocks, and dairies, I am better acquainted with than their inhabitants would believe possible. I know every stack of the one on the heights. Against the sky I see the stacking of corn and hay in the season, and can detect the slicing away of the provender, with an accurate eye, at the distance of several miles. I can follow the sociable farmer in his summer-evening ride, pricking on in the lanes where he is alone, in order to have more time for the unconscionable gossip at the gate of the next farm-house, and for the second talk over the paddock-fence of the next, or for the third or fourth before the porch, or over the wall, when the resident farmer comes out, pipe in mouth, and puffs away amidst his chat till the wife appears, with a shawl over her cap, to see what can detain him so long; and the daughter follows, with her gown turned over head (for it is now chill evening), and at last the social horseman finds he must be going, looks at his watch, and, with a gesture of surprise, turns his steed down a steep broken way to the beach, and canters home over the sands, left hard and wet by the ebbing tide, the white horse making his progress visible to me through the dusk. Then if the question arises which has most of the gossip spirit, he or I, there is no shame in the answer. Any such small amusement is better than harmless-is salutary—which carries . the spirit of the sick prisoner abroad into the open air, and among country people. When I shut down my window, I feel that my mind has had an airing." Here is another : "The sun, resting on the edge of the sea, was hidden from me by the walls of the old Priory: but a flood of rays poured through the windows of the ruin, and gushed over the waters, strewing them with diamonds, and then across the green down before my windows, gilding its furrows, and then lighting up the yellow sands on the opposite shore of the harbor, while the market-garden below was glittering with dew and busy with early bees and butterflies. Besides these bees and butterflies, nothing seemed stirring, except the earliest riser of the neighborhood, to whom the garden belongs. At the moment, she was passing down to feed her pigs, and let out her cows; and her easy pace, arms a-kimbo, and complacent survey of her early greens, presented me with a picture of ease so opposite to my own state, as to impress me ineffaceably. I was suffering too much to enjoy this picture at the moment: but how was it at the end of the year? The pains of all those hours were annihilated-as completely vanished as if they had never been; while the momentary peep behind the window-curtain made me possessor of this radiant picture for evermore." The mention of pictures reminds us of certain ones, and a commentary whence the reader may derive either a recipe, or a warning, as he desires to be, or not to be, an invalid for the remainder of his life. O! those beautiful pictures by our favorite Cuyp, with their rich atmosphere as of golden sherry and water! That gorgeous light flooding the wide level pasture, clinging to tree and stone, and trickling over into their shadows-a liquid radiance, we used to fancy we could wring out of the glowing herbage, and catch dripping from the sleek side of the dappled cow! Sad experience has made us personally acquainted with the original soil and climate of those scenes, and has painfully taught us that the rich glowing atmo sphere was no such wholesome aërial negus as we supposed, but a mixture of sunshine and humid exhalations, lovely but noxious—a gilded ague, an illuminated fever, a glorified pestilence, -which poisons the springs of life at their source. Breathe it, in bad health, and your fugitive complaints will become chronic, -regular standards, entwined in all their branches by the parasitic low slow fever of the swamp. In short, you will probably |