August 10. 1833
Nervous Weakness — — Hooker and Bull — — -Faith — — A Poet’s Need of Praise
A person, nervously weak, has a sensation of weakness which is as bad to him as muscular weakness. The only difference lies in the better chance of removal.
The fact, that Hooker and Bull, in their two palmary works respectively, are read in the Jesuit Colleges, is a curious instance of the power of mind over the most profound of all prejudices.
There are permitted moments of exultation through faith, when we cease to feel our own emptiness save as a capacity for our Redeemer’s fulness.
There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-breeding or incubation; a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on itself, like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man.