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CHAPTER XXVI.

ILL HEALTH.

OT long after Mr. Bowles's return to the Republican in the autumn of 1857, he began to suffer from violent headaches,-Nature's sharp signal that the engine had been overdriven. But he held close to his work, and for three years more his power of labor was not perceptibly impaired. From that time on to the end. of his life, he was in constant battle with physical infirmity. By avoiding such close application to his work as had been his previous habit, and by a succession of journeys longer or shorter, he kept himself equal to the main guidance of the Republican, and to a life very full and rich in its activities. Yet through it all he was a crippled man. The full delight and power of health he never tasted, after the tide of vitality began to ebb when he was only thirty-four. It was after that age that he did his best thinking and writing, fought his greatest fights, carried his newspaper to its highest attainment, and ripened in his most characteristic personal traits. But much of the work was done at sore cost, by strain of will instead of free spontaneity, with penalty of suffering days and restless nights. The actual achievement was tantalized by the sense of higher possibilities, seen but unachieved.

There was really but one resource and hope for full recovery,― rest, complete and long-continued. But he felt the necessity, first, of winning a competence for himself and his growing family. He felt, too, as editor and as citizen, the absorbing demands made by the swift succeeding acts in the great national drama. When, returning from the Traveller, he took again the working oar in the Republican, he wrote to a friend, October 19, 1857: "I would rather be 'fancy-free' for a few months or a year longer, but how can a man in these times?" In "these times" the Buchanan Administration was trying to force upon Kansas the fraudulent Lecompton constitution. The Supreme Court had just denied the possibility of American citizenship to any man with a black skin, and given slavery a legal foothold throughout the territories. Liberty, opposed by the government, found its champion in the press. To take part in the debate,-to express, and by expressing intensify, that public opinion which was to dethrone slavery,— was a task for which a man might well be willing to spend his life-blood.

The circumstances of his early life had wrought into Samuel Bowles like a second nature the habit of unresting activity. He had almost lost the power of mental quiescence. In his own house, sheltered and watched. over, he might for some brief hours sink into the languid torpor which the overtaxed system craved. But no home in the same town with his newspaper could be to him a refuge from the cares and thoughts connected with it. The best resource was in going away for a time. But he could hardly find any place where his social nature would not soon engage him in stirring conversations with old friends or new. How can a man get mental rest who hates solitude and who stimulates every mind he meets? This man had no taste for solitude, no genius for lonely

contemplation; no aptitude for that inward leisure in which the mind lies fallow, and in almost unconscious repose accumulates the energy for new harvests. Even Nature could not long hold him in silent communion. If there be a spot on earth where all soothing influences unite to woo man into self-forgetful passivity, it is Mount Desert. But even there, between mountains and sea, with the lulling dash of the waves to soothe the weary head, the air strong with ocean's salt and fragrant with the breath of pines,- amid the enchantment of sparkling bay and island cliffs and sun-steeped hills, the restless child of action could not be still. Said a friend who was with him there in 1863: "If we lay down on the shore to watch the waves, he would jump up in five minutes and be off to something else. He used to say to me, 'I wish I had your power of enjoyment.' The fault of his composition was, as Carlyle says of Sterling, that he had no inertia.”

Chronic ill health was henceforward the burden of Mr. Bowles's life. Of his bearing of that burden, the most significant circumstance is this, that neither the paper's readers nor his personal friends were ever wont to think of him as an invalid. To those who every morning scanned his work, it seemed to issue from a fountain of exhaustless vitality. It was almost impossible to believe that the alert, courageous, various newspaper had as its central inspiration a jaded and suffering brain. It was almost as hard for the great circle of friends, to whom his presence brought reviving cheer, to think of him as a man harassed by sleeplessness and all the subtle torture which wrecked nerves inflict. It was not in human nature that some of it should not have vent. His daily associates in the office found him sometimes moody and severe; to his home he often returned, pale, silent, and exhausted, but self-controlled and gentle.

Ill health was not without its inner compensations to him. It enforced something of leisure, and with leisure, even though it be that of invalidism, comes a deeper and more delicate sense of things passed by without notice in the midst of strenuous activity. It taught him lessons of patience, sympathy, and charity. Scarcely any human experience is harder to bear than the torture of mind and body, the suffering and the weakness which are caused by nervous exhaustion. Yet out of these depths the soul may bring an enlarged being,―a wider reach of sympathy, a finer tenderness, a strength of endurance. In the later half of Mr. Bowles's life, there was an alternation of heavier shadows and softer lights. Whoever compares the letters which immediately follow this chapter with those that precede it, will recognize in the writer a different man. If there is a loss of outward power, there is a gain of something higher.

His nervous malady came upon him gradually. It had begun to make itself acutely felt in the early part of October, 1860, when he wrote to Charles Allen:

"I am going through a 'crisis.' I don't know whether it is religious, mental, or physical, but I shall be better or worse when I get through. Whatever it is, it is awful night-mareish; not even twenty-three miles of saddle on Saturday drove it off. If it doesn't move soon I shall send for Mrs. Cook to come back and write my obituary, and for you to write my will."

Against the assaults of disease, his chief resources were a careful regimen, horseback exercise, and occasional absences from Springfield. His physician was Dr. David P. Smith, a man with a genius and passion for his pro fession, a commanding will, and a volcanic temperament. whose power showed itself best in cases requiring surgi cal or heroic treatment. He never took rest himself, and it was not his habit to prescribe it for others. H

used to tell Mr. Bowles in his stammering emphatic way, "K-k-kill a horse and it will do you good!" Mr. Bowles learned of necessity to be more regular in his hours, more careful in his diet, and to take more open-air recreation. But the regimen which is ample for preserving health is often quite insufficient to regain it.

It was a time when no man whose business touched public affairs could afford to be sick. Through the winter of 1860-61 the air was stormy and electric. One after another of the Southern states was seceding; the President was imbecile and his successor inexperienced and almost unknown; councils were divided, and the North did not know its own mind and heart or the temper of its opponent. Mr. Bowles inclined to a hopeful view of the situation, and looked to see the clouds blow over without a storm, as they had so often done before. Then came the day when news went over the country that Fort Sumter was under fire,-then, while from hour to hour men held their breath and waited, word came that the stars and stripes had been lowered in surrender. In one instant the nation shook off its paralysis. One great impulse swept all doubt and uncertainty to the winds. To restore the flag,-to save the Union,- was the passionate desire of all. The guns before which Sumter's flag went down had dealt the blow "that turns the coward's heart to steel, the sluggard's blood to flame." The inspiration of that day-its grief and resentment, its sudden revelation, like a resurrection from the dead, of a mighty love for the endangered country; the fusion of white-hot passion into inexorable purpose was the baptism for a lifeand-death struggle of four years. Into those years was crowded for the actors the equivalent of an ordinary life-time.