to wisdom. Even a man, or man's law, is never wise but when merciful.
But mercy has general conditions; and that which is mercy to the myriads
may seem hard to the one, and that which seems hard to the one in the pang
of a moment may be mercy when viewed by the eye that looks on through
eternity."

And from all this discourse--of which I now, at calm distance of time,
recall every word--my human, loving heart bore away for the moment but
this sentence, "Ye will need one another;" so that I cried out, "Life,
life, life! Is there no hope for her life? Have you no hope as
physician? I am a physician, too; I will see her. I will judge. I will
not be banished from my post."

"Judge, then, as physician, and let the responsibility rest with you. At
this moment, all convulsion, all struggle, has ceased; the frame is at
rest. Look on her, and perhaps only the physician's eye could distinguish
her state from death. It is not sleep, it is not trance, it is not the
dooming coma from which there is no awaking. Shall I call it by the name
received in our schools? Is it the catalepsy in which life is suspended,
but consciousness acute? She is motionless, rigid; it is but with a
strain of my own sense that I know that the breath still breathes, and the
heart still beats. But I am convinced that though she can neither speak,
nor stir, nor give sign, she is fully, sensitively conscious of all that
passes around her. She is like those who have seen the very coffin
carried into their chamber, and been unable to cry out, 'Do not bury me
alive!' Judge then for yourself, with this intense consciousness and this
impotence to evince it, what might be the effect of your presence,--first
an agony of despair, and then the complete extinction of life!"

"I have known but one such case,--a mother whose heart was wrapped up in a