" For God's sake, therefore, my dear fellow, do not rip
open the bird that lays the golden eggs. I have not received your book.
I read yesterday a sort of medical review about it. I suppose Longman
will send it to me when he sends down the "Lyrical Ballads" to
Wordsworth. I am solicitous to read the latter part. Did there appear to
you any remote analogy between the case I translated from the German
Magazine and the effects produced by your gas? Did Carlisle[1] ever
communicate to you, or has he in any way published his facts concerning
"pain", which he mentioned when we were with him? It is a subject which
"exceedingly interests" me. I want to read something by somebody
expressly on "pain", if only to give an "arrangement" to my own
thoughts, though if it were well treated, I have little doubt it would
revolutionize them. For the last month I have been trembling on through
sands and swamps of evil and bodily grievance. My eyes have been
inflamed to a degree that rendered reading and writing scarcely
possible; and strange as it seems, the act of metre composition, as I
lay in bed, perceptibly affected them, and my voluntary ideas were every
minute passing, more or less transformed into vivid spectra. I had
leeches repeatedly applied to my temples, and a blister behind my
ear--and my eyes are now my own, but in the place where the blister was,
six small but excruciating boils have appeared, and harass me almost
beyond endurance.
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