Weekly North Carolina Standard

COMFORT IN CONSUMPTION. WILLIS in his latest—and he announces by the way, that it is his last letter from Idlewild, to the readers of the Home Journal, consoles himself respecting the disease which seems to be slowly killing him, with such reflections as these:

But consumption, mourned over as it is, seems to me a gentle untying of the knot of life, instead of the sudden and harsh tearing asunder of its threads by other disease—a tenderness in the destroying angel, as it were, which greatly softens, some, his inevitable errand to us all. It is a decay with little or no pain, insensible almost in its progress—sometimes, year after year, in its more favorable phases. And it is not alone in its indulgent prolonging and deferring, that consumption is like a blessing. The cords which it first loosens are the coarser ones most confining to the mind. The weight of the material senses is gradually taken from the soul with the lightening of their food and the lapping of their strength. Probably, till he own himself an invalid, no man has ever given the wings of his spirit room enough—few, if any, have thought ministerings to body and soul so as senses to their secondary place and purity to their first. In weakness enough for this, and not enough to weaken—with consumption in otherwise commonly experienced—the mind becomes of a wonderfully new freedom and predominance. Things around alter their value. Estimates of persons and pursuits strangely change. Nature seems as newly beautiful as if a film had fallen from the eyes. The purer affections, the simpler motives, the humbler and more secluded reliance for sympathy are found to have been the closest-linked with thoughts bolder and freer. Who has not wondered at the cheerfulness of consumptive persons? It is because, with the senses kept under by invalid treatment, there is no "depression of spirits." With careful regimen and the system purified and disciplined, life, what there is of it, is in the most exhilarating balance of its varied proportions. Death is not dreaded where there is, thus, such a conscious breaking through of the wings of another life, freer and higher.