seeming antipathy to yourself is a good omen. You are inseparably
associated with her intellectual world; in proportion as she revives to
it, must become vivid and powerful the reminiscences of the shock that
annulled, for a time, that world to her. So I welcome, rather than fear,
the over-susceptibility of the awakening senses to external sights and
sounds. A few days will decide if I am right. In this climate the
progress of acute maladies is swift, but the recovery from them is yet
more startlingly rapid. Wait, endure, be prepared to submit to the will
of Heaven; but do not despond of its mercy."

I rushed away from the consoler,--away into the thick of the forests, the
heart of the solitude. All around me, there, was joyous with life; the
locust sang amidst the herbage; the cranes gambolled on the banks of the
creek; the squirrel-like opossums frolicked on the feathery boughs. "And
what," said I to myself,--"what if that which seems so fabulous in the
distant being whose existence has bewitched my own, be substantially true?
What if to some potent medicament Margrave owes his glorious vitality, his
radiant youth? Oh, that I had not so disdainfully turned away from his
hinted solicitations--to what?--to nothing guiltier than lawful
experiment. Had I been less devoted a bigot to this vain schoolcraft,
which we call the Medical Art, and which, alone in this age of science,
has made no perceptible progress since the days of its earliest
teachers--had I said, in the true humility of genuine knowledge, 'these
alchemists were men of genius and thought; we owe to them nearly all the
grand hints of our chemical science,--is it likely that they would have
been wholly drivellers and idiots in the one faith they clung to the
most?'--had I said that, I might now have no fear of losing my Lilian.
Why, after all, should there not be in Nature one primary essence, one
master substance; in which is stored the specific nutriment of life?"