up into convex or concave, and distorting everything so that he cannot see
the truth of the matter, without endless groping and manipulation: healthy,
clear, and free and discerning truly all around him."

The following extracts illustrate his attitude toward his physical
shortcomings, whatever they may have been.

... "A prey to nameless struggles and miseries, which have yet a kind of
horror in them to my thoughts, three weeks without any kind of sleep, from
impossibility to be free from noise."

"I sleep irregularly here, and feel a little, very little, more than my
usual share of torture every day. What the cause is would puzzle me
to explain. I take exercise sufficient daily; I attend with rigorous
minuteness to the quality of my food; I take all the precautions that I
can, yet still the disease abates not."

"Ill-health, the most terrific of all miseries."

"Grown sicker and sicker.... I want health, health, health! On this subject
I am becoming quite furious.... If I do not soon recover, I am miserable
forever and ever. They talk of the benefit of health from a moral point of
view. I declare solemnly, without exaggeration, that I impute nine-tenths
of my present wretchedness, and rather more than nine-tenths of all my
faults, to this infernal disorder in the stomach."

"Bilious, too, in these smothering windless days."

"Broke down in the park; _konnte_ _nichts mehr_, being sick and weak beyond
measure."