"Many days of suffering, of darkness, of despondency.... Ill-health has
much to do with it."

"Occasionally sharp pain (something cutting hard, grasping me around the
heart).... Something from time to time tying me tight as it were, all
around the region of the heart, and strange dreams haunting me."

"There is a shivering precipitancy in me, which makes _emotion_ of any kind
a thing to be shunned. It is my nerves, my nerves.... Such a nervous system
as I have.... Thomas feeling in his breast for comfort and finding bilious
fever.... All palpitating, fluttered with sleeplessness and drug-taking,
etc.... Weary and worn with dull blockheadism, chagrin (next to no sleep
the night before)."

"A head _full of air_; you know that wretched physical feeling; I had been
concerned with drugs, had awakened at five, etc. It is absolute martyrdom."

"A huge nightmare of indigestion, insomnia, and fits of black impatience
with myself and others,--self chiefly.... I am heartily sick of my
dyspeptic bewilderment and imprisonment."

"Alas! Alas! I ought to be wrapped in cotton wool, and laid in a locked
drawer at present. I can stand nothing. I am really ashamed of the figure I
cut."

Froude's statements regarding Carlyle's condition are as follows:

"... The simple natural life, the 'wholesome air, the daily rides or
drives, the poor food,... had restored completely the functions of a