A state of comparative health, mental
and physical with calmer sleep and a more natural exercise of the organs
of vision, succeeded. I have made many attempts at a further reduction,
but have been uniformly unsuccessful, owing to the extreme and almost
unendurable agony occasioned thereby.
"The peculiar creative faculty of the eye, the fearful gift of a
diseased vision, still remains, but materially weakened and divested of
its former terrors. My mind has recovered in some degree its shaken and
suspended faculties. But happiness, the buoyant and elastic happiness
of earlier days, has departed forever. Although, apparently, a
practical disciple of Behmen, I am no believer in his visionary creed.
Quiet is not happiness; nor can the absence of all strong and painful
emotion compensate for the weary heaviness of inert existence,
passionless, dreamless, changeless. The mind requires the excitement of
active and changeful thought; the intellectual fountain, like the pool
of Bethesda, has a more healthful influence when its deep waters are
troubled. There may, indeed, be happiness in those occasional 'sabbaths
of the soul,' when calmness, like a canopy, overshadows it, and the
mind, for a brief season, eddies quietly round and round, instead of
sweeping onward; but none can exist in the long and weary stagnation of
feeling, the silent, the monotonous, neverending calm, broken by neither
hope nor fear.
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