I wanted such a letter as yours, for I am very unwell. On Wednesday night I was seized with an intolerable pain from my right temple to the tip of my right shoulder, including my right eye, cheek, jaw, and that side of the throat. I was nearly frantic, and ran about the house naked, endeavouring by every means to excite sensations in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by creating division. It continued from one in the morning till half past five, and left me pale and fainting. It came on fitfully, but not so violently, several times on Thursday, and began severer threats towards night; but I took between sixty and seventy drops of laudanum,[123] and _sopped_ the Cerberus, just as his mouth began to open. On Friday it only _niggled_, as if the chief had departed from a conquered place, and merely left a small garrison behind, or as if he had evacuated the Corsica,[124] and a few straggling pains only remained. But _this morning_ he returned in full force, and his name is Legion. Giant-fiend of a hundred hands, with a shower of arrowy death-pangs he transpierced me, and then he became a wolf, and lay a-gnawing at my bones! I am not mad, most noble Festus, but in sober sadness I have suffered this day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of. My right cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exactness under the focus of some invisible burning-glass, which concentrated all the rays of a Tartarean sun. My medical attendant decides it to be altogether nervous, and that it originates either in severe application, or excessive anxiety. My beloved Poole! in excessive anxiety, I believe it might originate. I have a blister under my right ear, and I take twenty-five drops of laudanum every five hours, the ease and _spirits_ gained by which have enabled me to write you this flighty but not exaggerated account. With a gloomy wantonness of imagination I had been coquetting with the hideous _possibles_ of disappointment. I drank fears like wormwood, yea, made myself drunken with bitterness; for my ever-shaping and distrustful mind still mingled gall-drops, till out of the cup of hope I almost _poisoned_ myself with despair.
Your letter is dated November 2d; I wrote to you November 1st. Your sister was married on that day; and on that day several times I felt my heart overflowed with such tenderness for her as made me repeatedly ejaculate prayers in her behalf. Such things are strange. It may be superstitious to think about such correspondences; but it is a superstition which softens the heart and leads to no evil. We will call on your dear sister as soon as I am quite well, and in the mean time I will write a few lines to her.