[_The History of Isaac Jenkins, a Moral Fiction._ By Thomas Beddoes, M.D., 1793].
[Sidenote: HEAVINESS MAY ENDURE FOR A NIGHT]
With a loving generous man whose activity of intellect is exerted habitually on truth and events of permanent, or, at least, general interest still warmed and coloured by benevolent enthusiasm self-unconsciously, and whose heart-movements are all the property of the few, whom he dearly loves--with such a man, for the vast majority of the wrongs met with in life, that at all affect him, a one-night's sleep provides the oblivion and the cure--he awakes from his slumbers and his resentment at the same moment. Yesterday is gone and the clouds of yesterday. The sun is born again, and how bright and joyous! and I am born again! But O! there may be wrongs, for which with our best efforts for the most perfect suppression, with the absence, nay, the impossibility of anger or hate, yet, longer, deeper sleep is required for the heart's oblivion, and thence renewal--even the long total sleep of death.
To me, I dare avow, even this connects a new soothing with the thought of death, an additional lustre in anticipation to the confidence of resurrection, that such sensations as I have so often had after small wrongs, trifling quarrels, on first awaking in a summer morn after refreshing sleep, I shall experience after death for those few wounds too deep and broad for the _vis medicatrix_ of mortal life to fill wholly up with new flesh--those that, though healed, yet left an unsightly scar which, too often, spite of our best wishes, opened anew at other derangements and indispositions of the mental health, even when they were altogether unconnected with the wound itself or its occasions--even as the scars of the sailor, the relics and remembrances of sword or gun-shot wounds (first of all his bodily frame giving way to ungenial influences from without or from within), ache and throb at the coming in of rain or easterly winds, and open again and bleed anew, at the attack of fever, or injury from deficient or unwholesome food--that even for these I should enjoy the same delightful annihilation of them, as of ordinary wrongs after sleep.
I would say to a man who reminded me of a friend's unkind words or deeds which I had forgiven--Smoking is very well while we are all smoking, even though the head is made dizzy by it and the candle of reason burns red, dim and thick; but, for Heaven's sake, don't put an old pipe to my nose just at breakfast time, among dews and flowers and sunshine.