The true northerner. [volume] (Paw Paw, Mich.) 1855-1920, 1886-01-07

N writer IN the NuttOH DISCUSSES IN q
chatry article the influence that i'll
health has had on the character and
productions OF men OF letters. 1t is not
recognized sufficiently, he says. how
many famous persons of great influence
have been in feeble health for years, il
not for lifetime.
The great armies Of literature and
science have had many high and re-
nowned officers who, looked at closely,
are found to be crippled in foot or
palsisd in the hand-every way dis
abled, save not blind nor deaf nor
dumb in soul. Among them is Mr.
Darwin, who, pre-eminent in SO many
other respects, was pre-emnent also in
ill-health. An endless sea voyage on
stormy waters Ito speak in figure)
was the form his lifelong malady as
sumed, and let those who suffer at sea
wildly conceive, and others estimate
as well as they can, the forces of in
domitable energy of mind indicated
by his persistent and profound re-
searches. He was an invalid, and
nevertheless it was he who, as Mr..
Huxley said the other day, in pre-
senting to the English nation, on behalf
of the whole world, his Memorial
Statue, successfully fought the hard
est intellectual battle of these DAYS"
The feeling one entertains for him
and for all men who, to the world are
admirably other than to themselves, re-
sembles what Sainte-Beuve expressed
after reading a volume on the health
of Louis NV: "The general effect
which on reflection gather from these
pages, with regard to the Prince, who,
so worn upon inwardly, so disturbed by
bodily disease, was yet obliged SO often
to don his public demeanor. and wore
it so steadfastly, so uniformly and so
nobly-the last impression which en-
dures and rises uppermost is
respect. The real man was often ill,
the King always appeared to be in
good health" When this can be said
of the thinker-that the "man" was ill,
the thinker in good health-it is
high and rare praise. A sound mind
in an unsound body is perhaps the
noblest height of virtue but too often
the decrepitude of the one creates inn
perfection in the other. Let us con-
slider the vigorous writer's who have
been sick men.
! Shall we begin with Rousseau or
Doctor Johnson? Swift, or Heine, or
Pope? Leopard, or DeQuncey, or
Scarron, or Pascal, or Cowper, or Col
Inns, or Gray? SCOTS last years of
heroic failure? Coleridge's early years
OF miserable distress? Carlyle's i'm
mortal dyspepsia? George Eliot's
eternal headaches? Mrs. Browning or
Miss Bronte? Green, the brilliant his
torian, or Clifford, the eminent mathe-
matician? "What wouldn't do ex-
claims Hood, seven years before his
death, IF 1 had health and bodily
strength Pray for that when you
pray for me, for without it what clog
to ones WHEEL" Perhaps we shall
most clearly perceive how great clog
1t is if We compare some of these au-
thors with other writer's who had no
physical ailments to contend against.
Forced here to do this but hastily, our
readers will perhaps follow up in their
own minds our necessarily very imper-
feet suggestions.
From the authors compared, we
select the following instances as the
most striking and the best known:
But a mere name suggests SO much!
Gibbon. His infant existence" (can
any one imagine the infant Gibbon p
was so feeble as to be exceedingly
"precarious;" but after the age of six
teen. he himself assures us, STEW per-
sons have been more exempt from real
or imaginary Ills" And the quality of
his history testities to this. Such pages
were never written in suffering; while,
ON the contrary, Carlyle's genius in
every part, his philosophy and his
style, seems the outcome of the per-
sistent pain in which and with which
he wrote.
Burns and Keats we need only name
together, and to call to mind the bodily
presence OF each, to read the whole
story of the causes of the difference in
their lives. in their verse, in their hold
upon succeeding generations; the one
full-blooded and warm with human
sympathies; the other emaciated with
the Unsuitable longings, and fevered by
the ideal excitements, of an impover-
ished physique.
Against whom can we weigh Swift He
stands alone, and must be Judged alone
strongest of pitable men. One thinks
of him as of some mighty, almost CO.
lossal dwarf, or some beastly demi-god !;
with infinite compassion for the cruel
COMMISSIONS OF his life, for his GOODNESS
of nature and harshness of speech. so
clearly explained by the madness and
idiocy of his last days. Swift powers
were all his own; and this, it is to be
observed, is markedly true of most of
the men of whom we are speaking Ill
health and originality seem to be close
ly connected.
If in Pope and Heine-lesser men
but greater artists-we find traits akin
to Swift's coarseness and vindictive-
ness both, nevertheless, carried their
burdens of disability in q more human
izing spirit; and, spite of their thin
skins and bitter blood, are companion
able to their fellow-men. The coura-
geous gayety with which Heine treated
his tortures harmonizes we'll with the
astonishing force OF spirit with which he
retained his activity of mind through
his eight interminable years of dying
agony, and went on composing with
undiminished fire to the last, desiring
to be called "a brave soldier in the lib
Grafton war of humanity" But would
we once more see the difference
between the work of illness and