"I can only touch, you see, on a few ingredients in this magnificent
pharmacy; its resources are boundless, but require the nicest
discretion. I remember to have cured a disconsolate widower, who
obstinately refused every other medicament, by a strict course of
geology. I dipped him deep into gneiss and mica schist. Amidst the
first strata I suffered the watery action to expend itself upon cooling,
crystallized masses; and by the time I had got him into the tertiary
period, amongst the transition chalks of Maestricht and the conchiferous
marls of Gosau, he was ready for a new wife. Kitty, my dear, it is no
laughing matter! I made no less notable a cure of a young scholar at
Cambridge who was meant for the church, when he suddenly caught a cold
fit of freethinking, with great shiverings, from wading out of his depth
in Spinoza. None of the divines, whom I first tried, did him the least
good in that state; so I turned over a new leaf, and doctored him gently
upon the chapters of faith in Abraham Tucker's book (you should read it,
Sisty); then I threw in strong doses of Fichte; after that I put him on
the Scotch inetaphy sicians, with plunge-baths into certain German
transcendentalists; and having convinced him that faith is not an
unphilosophical state of mind, and that he might believe without
compromising his understanding,--for he was mightily conceited on that
score,--I threw in my divines, which he was now fit to digest; and his
theological constitution, since then, has become so robust that he has
eaten up two livings and a deanery! In fact, I have a plan for a
library that, instead of heading its compartments, 'Philology, Natural
Science, Poetry,' etc., one shall head them according to the diseases
for which they are severally good, bodily and mental,--up from a dire
calamity or the pangs of the gout, down to a fit of the spleen or a
slight catarrh; for which last your light reading comes in with a whey-
posset and barley-water. But," continued my father, more gravely, "when
some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a