"I shall never get on at this rate," said my father, in a tone between
reproach and entreaty.

"Be good children, Roland and Blanche both," said my mother, stopping
from her work and holding up her needle threateningly,--and indeed
inflicting a slight puncture upon the Captain's shoulder.

"'Rem acu tetigisti,' my dear," said my father, borrowing Cicero's pun
on the occasion. (1) "And now we shall go upon velvet. I say, then,
that books, taken indiscriminately, are no cure to the diseases and
afflictions of the mind. There is a world of science necessary in the
taking them. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel,
or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-
draught for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is
really heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to
study a science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who
knew what he was about. In a great grief like that you cannot tickle
and divert the mind, you must wrench it away, abstract, absorb,--bury it
in an abyss, hurry it into a labyrinth. Therefore, for the irremediable
sorrows of middle life and old age I recommend a strict chronic course
of science and hard reasoning,--counter-irritation. Bring the brain to
act upon the heart! If science is too much against the grain (for we
have not all got mathematical heads), something in the reach of the
humblest understanding, but sufficiently searching to the highest,--a
new language, Greek, Arabic, Scandinavian, Chinese, or Welsh! For the
loss of fortune, the dose should be applied less directly to the
understanding,--I would administer something elegant and cordial. For
as the heart is crushed and lacerated by a loss in the affections, so it
is rather the head that aches and suffers by the loss of money. Here we