PHILOSOPHY OF SICKNESS. 321 



He was considerably bantered for his ungallant conduct. 

 From the concluding portion of the letter it is evident 

 that Miss Dunbar had pressed Miller to visit her. 



' Cromarty, March 12, 1833. 



' You have been unwell for a long long time, but 

 now that you have recovered I may venture to say " It 

 was all for the best/' without, I trust, subjecting myself 

 to the suspicion of being one of those cold philosophic 

 sort of people, mere abstract intelligence, who are so 

 bravely employed in thinking that they have no time to 

 feel. Indisposition is, to be sure, a sad thing in itself. 

 Sad matter for the soul to be sitting in darkness, in the 

 recesses of her poor shattered tenement, like Marius amid 

 the ruins of Carthage ; to have at morning to breathe 

 one's wishes in the language of the text, " Would God it 

 were evening ! " and at evening, " Would God it were 

 morning ! " But when we consider human life as a 

 whole, and man as a creature that lives both in the 

 past and the future, we see that even pain and sickness 

 form parts of a beautiful and well-arranged system. 

 Nay, I am convinced, paradoxical as the opinion may 

 appear, that they add nearly as much to the sum of 

 human happiness as they take from it. You, my dear 

 madam, have been long very unwell, and now you have 

 recovered, recovered what ? health ? nay, that would 

 be but little, you had that some few months before ; 

 have you not also recovered your youth ? the freshness, 

 gaiety, and the warm hopes of girlhood. Life palls 

 upon us when our course through it lies, if I may so 

 speak, on a smooth level road bounded by two straight 

 walls, and we grow old in our spirits while we are yet 

 young in years, not so when the path goes winding over 

 hills and valleys, with here a deep broad stream which we 



VOL. I. 21 



