In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an
incoherence--an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a
series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual
trepidancy, an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this
nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter than by
reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced
from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action
was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a
tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in
abeyance) to that species of energetic concision--that abrupt,
weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation--that leaden,
self-balanced, and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may
be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium,
during the periods of his most intense excitement.
It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest
desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He
entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of
his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and
one for which he despaired to find a remedy--a mere nervous affection,
he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It
displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations.
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