How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye? The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which was his presence chamber, where he lay and acted his despotic fancies--how is it reduced to a common bedroom! The trimness of the very bed has something petty and unmeaning about it. It is _made_ every day. How unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which it presented so short a time since, when to _make_ it was a service not to be thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when the patient was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to the encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and decencies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be lifted into it again, for another three or four days' respite, to flounder it out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was a historical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for a little ease; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled coverlid. Hushed are those mysterious sighs--those groans--so much more awful, while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is solved; and Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage. Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of greatness survives in the still lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how is he too changed with everything else! Can this be he--this man of news--of chat--of anecdote--of every thing but physic--can this be he, who so lately came between the patient and his cruel enemy, as on some solemn embassy from Nature, erecting herself into a high mediating party? Pshaw!'tis some old woman. Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous--the spell that hushed the household--the desart-like stillness, felt throughout its inmost chambers--the mute attendance--the inquiry by looks--the still softer delicacies of self-attention--the sole and single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon itself--world-thoughts excluded--the man a world unto himself--his own theatre-- What a speck is he dwindled into!