He gave me a very melancholy account
of my poor friend, drawing me for that purpose a
little apart from the lady. ``The light of life,'' he
said, ``was trembling in the socket; he scarcely
expected it would ever leap up even into a momentary
flash, but more was impossible.'' He then
stepped towards his patient, and put some questions,
to which the poor invalid, though he seemed
to recognise the friendly and familiar voice, answered
only in a faltering and uncertain manner.
The young lady, in her turn, had drawn back
when the doctor approached his patient. ``You see
how it is with him,'' said the doctor, addressing
me; ``I have heard our poor friend, in one of the
most eloquent of his pleadings, give a description
of this very disease, which he compared to the tortures
inflicted by Mezentius, when he chained the
dead to the living. The soul, he said, is imprisoned
in its dungeon of flesh, and though retaining its
natural and unalienable properties, can no more
exert them than the captive enclosed within a prison-house
can act as a free agent. Alas! to see
him, who could so well describe what this malady
was in others, a prey himself to its infirmities! I
shall never forget the solemn tone of expression
with which he summed up the incapacities of the
paralytic,---the deafened ear, the dimmed eye, the
crippled limbs,---in the noble words of Juvenal---
------` omni
Membrorum damno major, dementia, qu
nec
Nomina servorum, nec vultum agnoscit amici.
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