"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." "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 stomach never so far wrong as he had imagined.... Afterwards he was always impatient, moody, irritable, violent. These humours were in his nature, and he could no more be separated from them than his body could leap off its shadow.... He looked back to it as the happiest and wholesomest home that he had ever known. He could do fully twice as much work there, he said, as he could ever do afterwards in London." "... If his liver occasionally troubled him, livers trouble most of us as we advance in life, and his actual constitution was a great deal stronger than that of ordinary men.... Why could not Carlyle, with fame and honor and troops of friends, and the gates of a great career flung open before him, and a great intellect and a conscience untroubled by a single act which he need regret, bear and forget too? Why indeed! The only answer is that Carlyle was Carlyle."