340 JACOB BIGELOW. 



Books at length could no longer serve his failing sight; still he 

 recognized the faces of those around him, and was gladdened hy the 

 cheerful light of morning. But the curtains were drawn closer and 

 closer, until at last he could distinguish his friends only by their voices. 

 And, as the years moved onward, each took something from the grad- 

 ually yielding organization. A loss of power in the lower limbs 

 rendered him helpless, and soon confined him wholly to his bed. Who 

 could have wondered if the burden of his lamentation had borrowed 

 the words which Milton puts in the mouth of the blind captive, — the 

 strong man of Israel ? 



" Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half. 

 dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, 

 Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse 

 Without all hope of day ! " 



Not such were the words, not such was the spirit in which this once 

 strong man, now blind and bound in chains heavier than any captive 

 wears, spoke with his visitors. He greeted them with the same cheer- 

 ful cordiality with which he had received them in health. His mind 

 showed much of its old vivacity. He was often intensely interested in 

 conversation ; and his sense of the ridiculous, which in him was the 

 sign of exuberant life in a happy temperament and a quick and pene- 

 trating intelligence, had lost nothing of its acuteness at a time when his 

 bodily infirmities had become such as to render him entirely helpless. 



Dr. Bigelow's life at this time was a kind of intellectual hiberna- 

 tion. He was living on the stores of a long and active period of mental 

 labor and acquisition. He called on his memory to restore its buried 

 treasures, and it obeyed him with singular docility. Passages from 

 the classic authors, from his favorite English poets, Byron especially, 

 retraced themselves at his bidding, with an accuracy that was surpris- 

 ing. Not long before the closing stage of mental decline, I remember 

 talking with him about his reminiscences of the physicians of an earlier 

 generation. He always had a keen eye for every kind of pretension, 

 and could let the nonsense out of a tumid celebrity with an epigram- 

 matic phrase or a characteristic anecdote in a way which would have 

 made him terrible, had he not been very good-natured and altogether 

 too knowing to give babblers and simpletons a chance to quarrel with 

 him. He never said a malicious thing in my hearing ; but when there 

 was nothing to restrain him, he made very short work with overrated 

 celebrities, and the " most magnanimous mouse " that had been pro- 

 nounced a lion subsided into his proper and harmless dimensions, under 

 his handling, with wonderful celerity. There never was a kinder sat' 



