Study and Stimulants: Or, the Use of Intoxicants and Narcotics in Relation to Intellectual Life, as Illustrated by Personal Communications on the Subject, from Men of Letters and of Science
Science
Study and Stimulants: Or, the Use of Intoxicants and Narcotics in Relation to Intellectual Life, as Illustrated by Personal Communications on the Subject, from Men of Letters and of Science
Another cause to which I attribute my extraordinary degree of health,
has been not merely continued country exercise in walking and
gardening, but, now and then, making a clean breach and change of my
location and mode of life. Travel is one of the great invigorators of
the system, both physically and intellectually. When I have found a
morbid condition stealing over me, I have at once started off on a
pedestrian or other journey. The change of place, scene, atmosphere,
of all the objects occupying the daily attention, has at once put to
flight the enemy. It has vanished as by a spell. There is nothing like
a throwing off the harness and giving mind and body a holiday--a treat
to all sorts of new objects. Once, a wretched, nervous feeling grew
upon me; I flung it off by mounting a stage-coach, and then taking a
walk from the Land's End, in Cornwall, to the north of Devon. It was
gone for ever! Another time the "jolly" late dinners and
blithely-circulating decanter, with literary men, that I found it
almost impossible to avoid altogether without cutting very valuable
connections, gave me a dreadful dyspepsia. I became livingly sensible
of the agonies of Prometheus with the daily vulture gnawing at his
vitals. At once I started with all my family for a year's sojourn in
Germany, which, in fact, proved three years. But the fiend had left me
the very first day. The moment I quitted the British shore, the
tormentor quitted me. I suppose he preferred staying behind, where he
was aware of so many promising subjects of his diabolical art. New
diet, new and early hours, and all the novelties of foreign life, made
his approach to me impossible. I have known him no more, during these
now thirty years.
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