Who can sufficiently speak of these symptoms, or prescribe rules to comprehend them? As _Echo_ to the painter in _Ausonius_, _vane_, _quid affectas_, &c.--foolish fellow, what wilt? if you must needs paint me, paint a voice, _et similem si vis pingere, pinge sonum_; if you will describe melancholy, describe a phantastical conceit, a corrupt imagination, vain thoughts and different, which who can do? The four-and-twenty letters make no more variety of words in divers languages, than melancholy conceits produce diversity of symptoms in several persons. They are irregular, obscure, various, so infinite, _Proteus_ himself is not so diverse; you may as well make the Moon a new coat, as a true character of a melancholy man; as soon find the motion of a bird in the air, as the heart of man, a melancholy man. They are so confused, I say, diverse, intermixt with other diseases. As the species be confounded (which I have shewed) so are the symptoms; sometimes with headache, _cachexia_, dropsy, stone, (as you may perceive by those several examples and illustrations, collected by _Hildesheim, spicel. 2_,_ Mercurialis, consil. 118, cap. 6 et 11_), with headache, epilepsy, _priapismus_ (_Trincavellius, consil. 12, lib. I, consil. 49_), with gout, _caninus appetitus_ (_Montanus, consil. 26, &c., 23, 234, 249_), with falling-sickness, headache, _vertigo_, _lycanthropia_, _&c._ (_J. Cæsar Claudinus, consult. 4, consult. 89 et 116_), with gout, agues, hæmrods, stone, &c. Who can distinguish these melancholy symptoms so intermixt with others, or apply them to their several kinds, confine them into method? 'Tis hard I confess, yet I have disposed of them as I could, and will descend to particularize them according to their species. For hitherto I have expatiated in more general lists or terms, speaking promiscuously of such ordinary signs, which occur amongst writers. Not that they are all to be found in one man, for that were to paint a Monster or Chimæra, not a man; but some in one, some in another, and that successively, or at several times. Which I have been the more curious to express and report, not to upbraid any miserable man, or by way of derision (I rather pity them), but the better to discern, to apply remedies unto them; and to shew that the best and soundest of us all is in great danger; how much we ought to fear our own fickle estates, remember our miseries and vanities, examine and humiliate ourselves, seek to God, and call to him for mercy, that needs not look for any rods to scourge ourselves, since we carry them in our bowels; and that our souls are in a miserable captivity, if the light of grace and heavenly truth doth not shine continually upon us; and by our discretion to moderate ourselves, to be more circumspect and wary in the midst of these dangers. HORACE BUSHNELL (1802-1876) BY THEODORE T. MUNGER