I844-54- TRIALS OF SICKNESS. 255 



and most of all to sympathize with you in your present 

 sorrow. Think not that I despise tears, or count them 

 unmanly. If I said once that I did not weep, it was to 

 explain an allusion in a verse, not to parade the fact, or to 

 boast of it. 



" Weeping, or not weeping, is neither here nor there as a 

 sign of courage or the want of it. It is dependent in great 

 part on a man's physical make, and the action of a little 

 gland. When I am prostrated my mind eats inwards, and 

 broods in morbid silence and gloom. Tears would be a 

 relief, but they will not come. I would be thankful if they 

 did, and take no credit that they do not. 



"I can, I think, altogether sympathize with you, in the 

 great reluctance with which you must have left Cambridge 

 just when a new term was beginning. When one is ex- 

 ceedingly ill, one is engrossed with the calamity which 

 compels everything to yield to it : and when well, how 

 much there is to do ! But to be neither very ill nor very 

 well ; to have a certain fitness for work, and conviction of 

 its importance, and yet no sustaining relish or enduring 

 capacity for it, this is a sore trial of faith and patience, as 

 months of its endurance have again taught me. 



" Yet I am sure such seasons will often, with God's bless- 

 ing, teach us what exulting health and terrible agony cannot, 

 and are as needful to ripen many of us for another world, as 

 a cup running over with mercies, or sharp strokes of affliction. 

 Great torture is not only maddening, but enslaving ; it makes 

 the mind reel, and fills the heart with terror. Full health is 

 self-reliant, God-forgetting, and unheeding. A dreary season, 

 such as you see before you, often permits a more profitable 

 study of God, and carries us farther forward in the divine 

 life, than the extremes of ill-health or its opposite will do. 



" I do not overlook, in saying this, that the moral regimen 



