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I 
ART OF PRESERVING HEALTH.
 
w 
THE ART
OF
PRESERVING  HEALTH
        A POEM, IN FOUR BOOKS.    '

                     V
     BY JOHN ARMSTRONG, M. D.

              WITH A       ✓

CRITICAL ESSAY BY J. AIKEN, M.  D.
AND
NOTES BY DR. ALCOTT.
         BOSTON:
GEORGE \V. LIGHT, 1 CORNHILL.
           1838. 
Wz. 
PREFACE
      BY  THE AMERICAN EDITOR.

  This beautiful  little Poem was  first pub-
lished at Edinburgh in 1744—nearly one hun-
dred years ago.  It was re-published in Boston
in 1802, but  is now out of print.  With  the
exception of  a  few points  to which I have
adverted  in the Notes, and two short  para-
graphs which it was thought proper to omit,
the  doctrines of  the  Poem on  the  Influence
of  Air, Diet,  Exercise,  and  the   Passions,
on  Health, are  such as must commend them-
selves  to the friends of temperance in every
age  and  in every country.   The  two  pas-
sages which I  have  omitted, related exclu-
sively to  the occasional use of wine, which 
6
PREFACE.
 the doctor, with a strange but very common
 inconsistency, seems inclined to permit.
   It is encouraging and truly cheering to find
 in so ancient and distinguished a medical man
 as Dr. Armstrong, the bold  and decided advo-
 cate of  principles which we are laboring  to
, establish in this country at the present time,
 but which even now—a century later—are
 deemed  by many as  in some respects  ultra.
 Truth is truth, however, and must ultimately
 prevail; and in this we have our consolation.
                                   w. A. A.
   Boston, July, 1838. 
CONTENTS.
Critical Essay on the Poem, by Dr. Aiken.  .  9—30

                   BOOK I.—AIR.
A u thor's invocation to the goddess of health. He advises
  his  readers to shun the  city—to avoid the stagnant
  marsh—too dry an  air—to  seek a proper medium.
  Proper place for building.........31—46


                  BOOK  II.—DIET.
Nature of digestion in general.   Liquid food.  Diseased
  flesh meat.  Extremes.  Food  for different constitu-
  tions. Experience.  To what extent man is  omniv-
  orous.  Evils of mixed dishes.  Simple dishes seldom
  offend.  Leanness of body.  Food to be adapted in
  some measure to the seasons, and to climates.  Boun-
  ties of nature in every clime.  Water extolled.  Some
  of the causes of disease.  Natural death.  Few attain
  to it.................47—70

              BOOK  III.—EXERCISE.
Case of the hard laborer.  Effects of toil on the bodily
  organs. Virtues of the chase.  Gardening.  We should,
  if possible, indulge our taste.  Exercise of the differ- 
8                     CONTENTS.
  ent parts of the body.   Begin physical exercise mod-
  erately.  Cooling suddenly when over-heated. Warm
  bathing.  Cold  bathing.  Physical and moral benefits
  of cleanliness.  Diseases produced by errors in regard
  to study.  Physical changes should be gradual.  Epi-
  demic diseases.   Sweating sickness of England.  Its
  horrors depicted.............71—98


            BOOK  IV.—THE PASSIONS.
How much the mind  affects the body.   Rules in regard
  to study.  Position of the body.  The great art of life
  is to  manage well the mind.  Hypochondria—how
  cured.   Precepts and life of an "old  man." Impor-
  tance of cheerfulness.   Tendency  of  the  selfish pas-
  sions on health.  Effects of love.  Its excesses.  Ef-
  fects of  anger.  Salutary effects of music.  .  .  99—120 
CRITICAL  ESSAY ON THE POEM.


              BY  J. AIKEN, M. D.


  The subject  of  the following Poem seems hap-
pily calculated for didactic poetry.  To say that it
is a peculiarly proper one  for a physician to write
upon, is saying nothing of consequence to the reader.
But the preservation of health  is, in the first place,
a matter of general importance, and therefore inter-
esting  to readers of every class.  Then, although
its rules, scientifically considered, belong to a par-
ticular profession, and require  previous studies for
their  full  comprehension, yet  in the popular use,
they are level to the understanding and experience
of every man of reading and reflection.  Had the
subject been more strictly medical,  such as the
nature and cure of a particular disease, it would
have been liable to the objections attending a con- 
10              CRITICAL ESSAY.
fined  and professional topic,  and could scarcely,
by the greatest poetical  skill, have been rendered
generally pleasing or instructive.  But every man
being in some measure entrusted with the care of
his own health, and being accustomed to  specula-
tions concerning Air, Diet, Exercise, and the Pas-
sions, the subject may be  considered  as universal.
It is  true, these  topics can  be poetically treated
only in  a  popular manner;  and  the  writer who
chooses the  vehicle of verse  in  treating of them,
must take up with common and perhaps superficial
notions.  But by associating  these  notions with
images addressed to  the imagination,  he may con-
vey them in a more  agreeable form ;  and he may
advantageously employ the diction  of poetry to
give  to practical rules  an energy and conciseness
of expression which  may forcibly imprint them on
the memory.  This power is, indeed, the principal
circumstance which  imparts real utility to didactic
poetry; and we all  feel  its effects, on becoming
acquainted  with  the  moral and  critical works of
such authors as Horace, Boileau and Pope.  . Fur-
ther, the topics with which the  Art of Health is
conversant,  are connected  with  various   of  the 
CRITICAL ESSAY.               11
loftiest and most extensive  speculations on general
nature ; and in pursuing the regular vein of thought,
many sources of truly poetical ideas may be opened.
It remains now to examine how far the author has
availed  himself of  the advantages of his subject,
and in what manner he has supported the character
of a didactic poet.
   As invocation is  an established part  of  a regular
poem, it  was necessary that the  piece before us
should  be provided with  that  decoration.   The
choice of Hygeia, or the goddess of Health, for the
object of address, was  dictated  by a very obvious
propriety.  The manner is  imitated from that of
Lucretius  in his fine  invocation of Venus ;  and
much imagination  is  displayed in the  description
of her approach, and  of the  various  baleful forms
of disease and death that fly  from  her presence.
   Of the sources  from which health is drawn,
salubrious air is one of the most remarkable.   Air,
therefore, with propriety, is made the peculiar topic
of the  first book.   Perhaps a descriptive passage
of more  strength can  scarcely be met with  than
that which enumerates the various contaminations
of this element  in a  crowded  city.  The ideas, 
12
CRITICAL  ESSAY.
indeed, in their own nature disgusting, might be
thought almost too  vividly represented, did  they
not by contrast add to the  sweetness of the subse-
quent rural  picture,  the effect of which  is  almost
equal to that of the fabled calenture, in calling forth
irresistible  longings   after   the  country.    Every
reader familiar with  the vicinity of the metropolis,
will feel peculiar pleasure from the glimpses given
of  those favorite summer retreats, Windsor, Rich-
mond, Dulwich and  Hampstead, which will excite
in  his mind particular images, always much more
engaging  to the fancy than general  ones.  The
poet  next exercises his invention in one  of the
higher efforts  of the  art, that of allegorical personi-
fication.   His  figure and  genealogy  of Quartana
are well  imagined;   but  like  most of those who
create these  fancy-formed beings, he fails in the
agency he attributes  to her; for in merely inspiring
a fit of  the  ague, she acts not as a person, but as
an  incorporeal cause.
   He goes on to describe the different sites un-
friendly to  health, particularly the too moist and
the too dry, which he  makes  the foundation of
what are called in the schools of physic the phleg- 
CRITICAL ESSAY.
13
matic  and  melancholic temperaments.   In  his
instructions how to guard against the evils of differ-
ent situations, he somewhat anticipates his future
topics of diet and exercise.  The passage, however,
is full of vigorous description ;  and the means of
correcting  the  watery and the parched soil afford
spirited sketches of landscape.  But he is nowhere
so minute, as in that perpetual topic of an English-
man, the bad weather under which our island is so
frequently submerged.  A kind of splenetic strength
of  painting distinguishes  his gloomy  draught of
loaded  skies and eastern blasts, and of that vexa-
tious fickleness of weather, in which all the seasons
seem to " mix  in every monstrous day."
   We  are, however,  brought  into good humor
again,  by the description of cheerful,,dry and shel-
tered spots, in  which  atmospherical evils may be
palliated; and  the concluding eulogy on the cheer-
ing and invigorating influence of solar heat, leaves
the  fancy  agreeably  impressed  with  a  sensation
similar to that imparted by a serene summer's day.
On the whole,  the descriptive beauties of this book
are  considerable ; but as  a leading head  of his
subject, it might, I conceive, have been lengthened 
14              CRITICAL ESSAY.
with advantage, by some  circumstances relative to
the influence of air upon  health, which he has not
touched  upon.  The sudden operation  upon  the
spirits  by alterations in the  weight of the atmos-
phere, as  indicated by the barometer,  and  the
medicinal effects of change of climate upon inva-
lids, would have afforded matter both for curious
discussion, and interesting and even  pathetic nar-
ration.
   Diet, the subject of  the second book, is, as  the
writer observes on entering upon it, comparatively
barren  and unfavorable to  poetry.   It is  evidently
more immersed in technical investigations than  the
former ;  and  its connection with the grossest of the
sensual  pleasures, renders it difficult  to be treated
on without derogating from the dignity of a philo-
sophical  poem.  Dr.  Armstrong,  however,  has
managed  it with judgment.   He  begins  with a
scientific topic, necessary  as  a  foundation  for  the
preceptive part which is to follow—the circulation
of the blood.  This function, however, admits of
easy illustration  from  the common  principles of
hydraulics, as  displayed in  the  motion  of water
through pipes and channels.   The constant waste 
CRITICAL  ESSAY.
15
of solid particles that such a perpetual current must
produce,  demonstrates the  necessity for  a new
supply by means of somewhat taken in.   Hence
naturally  follows the consideration of food, its con-
coction, and the choice of aliments, solid and fluid,
suited to  persons of different constitutions, and in
different climates.   This  is the general plan of the
book.   The poet's  skill consists in taking the sub-
ject out of the language and reasonings of science,
familiarizing  it by apt illustration, and diversifying
it by amusing  digression.  All this he has attempted,
and with  success.
   We  shall   not closely  follow his steps while he
treats of  the digestibility  and salubriousness of dif-
ferent foods, and lays down rules for the regulation
of appetite.   The  subject, as  we before hinted, is
not of the most pleasing kind;  and it is apparently
rather from necessity than choice that he  enters
into it.   His  expressions  and  images are strong;
but  strength  so  employed is  unavoidably akin to
coarseness.   A more agreeable  topic is the praise
of  temperance and simple  diet, from  which  he
easily slides into a beautiful moral passage, showing
how much better riches may be employed than in 
16
CRITICAL ESSAY.
the luxuries  of the  table, by relieving  indigence
and unfriended merit. One line is almost unrivalled
in pathetic energy.
   " Though hushed in patient wretchedness at home."

   The opposite evils arising from too full and too
scanty a diet, are next  enumerated, and cautions
are given  respecting the progress from one to the
other.  The different regimen proper for the sev-
eral seasons of the year is then touched upon; and
this naturally leads the  poet to open a new source
of variety in description, derived from  a  view of
human life as subsisting in climates removed to the
two extremes from our own.  The  picture of the
frigid zone is  but slightly sketched; that of the
torrid regions  is much  more  minute, and will
strongly remind the reader of a similar one by the
hand of Thomson ;  but I dare not  assert  that  it
will lose nothing  by the comparison.   It is rendered
less appropriate  by the enumeration of vegetable
articles  which in reality belong to very different-
climates—the cocoa and anana being many degrees
separated from the countries rich in corn and wine.
The cedar of Lebanon, likewise, as  a native of the 
CRITICAL ESSAY.
17
bleak tops of high mountains, ought not to be placed
by the side of the palm and plantain.
  The succeeding passage, however, which  paints
the wonders of the Naiad kingdom, though  it also
has its parallel in the Seasons, is not, I think, sur-
passed by that, or any other poem, in strength and
grandeur of description.   The awful  sublimity of
the scenes themselves, and the artifice  of the poet
in introducing himself as a spectator, and marking
the supposed impressions on hig own mind, elevate
this piece to the very summit of descriptive poetry.
   The praise of water-drinking follows; with the
precepts of the father of physic for choosing  rightly
this pure and innocent beverage.   Notwithstanding
the apparent earnestness  with  which the poet
dwells  on' this  topic, there is some reason  to sus-
pect that  he was not  quite  hearty in the  cause.
The physician  and sage sometimes  seem  lost in
the jolly companion.  He  soon, however, resumes
those characters ;  and after remarking the tendency
of a continued  use of wine to bring on premature
old age, he digresses into  a  theoretical account of
the process by which the  animal machine is grad-
ually impeded in  its  motions, and at length comes
           2 
IS              CRITICAL ESSAY.
to a full stop.  This  conducts him  to  a striking
termination  of the  book, in a  lofty description of
the ravages made by time upon the works of human
art, and the world itself.
   Exercise, the  subject of the third book, is  a
theme more  adapted to poetry, and less immersed
in professional disquisitions, than that of the  pre-
ceding.  Its  benefits in the preservation of health
are universally known ; and the poet's task is rather
to frame upon it pictures agreeable to the imagina-
tion, than to  treat of it  in a closely preceptive  or
scientific manner.   Dr. Armstrong begins with  a
lively portrait of the rustic, rendered firm and robust
by toil, like  a sturdy oak of the forest;  and he
produces him as a specimen of the  influence of
exercise on the human  frame.  He  then exhorts
the votary of health to  partake of the various kinds
of rural pastime, the walk in all seasons, the chase,
and the sport of fishing.   This last amusement
introduces  a very pleasing  passage, in which the
poet  characterises various streams, particularly the
Liddel, on whose pastoral banks he first  drew
breath.  The tribute of affection he  pays to his
native place, and the retrospect of  his own boyish 
CRITICAL  ESSAY.
19
years, are sweetly interesting, and vie with all that
Thomson and  Smollet have written on  a similar
topic.
  The  species of exercise  afforded- by gardening,
gives occasion to a moral picture, of a man retired
from public  life  to  the cultivation of his  estate,
surrounded with a select society of old companions,
of the same tastes and pursuits with himself.  This
is wrought  so much in the manner of Thomson,
that, were it not for some difference of style, it
might  pass  undistinguished  as a  passage  of  the
Seasons.  The  " noctes coenaeque  deum " of Hor-
ace have contributed to adorn the piece.
  Resuming the medical consideration of exercise,
he next  adverts to its power in strengthening weak
parts by habitual  exertion ;  and  he dwells on the
propriety of  a  gradual  progress from rest to labor,
and  on  the  mischiefs  attending too  violent  and
heedless toils.  This leads  him to a serious  and
pathetic  apostrophe  on the fatal effects proceeding
from exposure to cold, or draughts of cold liquor,
when  heated,  which he  represents  as  the most
frequent of  all causes of  mortal  disease.  The
ancient use of warm baths and unctions after exer- 
20         x      CRITICAL  ESSAY.

cise  is his next  topic, in  speaking of  which,  he
finds  it neeessary to  touch upon that important
function of the body, insensible perspiration.  The
strict connection  of  this with health  and disease,
acccording as it is regular or deranged, has been a
favorite argument with certain medical schools, and
is here briefly illustrated in poetical language.  The
use of cold bathing in steeling the frame against the
inclemencies of a cold climate, and the advantages
of frequent ablution in hot ones, and of cleanliness
in  all, are further subjects of digression.
   He returns to the consideration of exercise, as it
is  limited  by  recurring changes  of the day  and
year—warning against it while  the body is loaded
with food, and during the heats of a summer's noon,
and  the chills of evening.  These  preceptive re-
marks lead him  to  a  vein more fertile  of ideas,
addressed to the imagination;  for, conceiving the
day to be sunk into the silence and  gloom of mid-
night, he  views  the  toil-spent  hind, wrapt  in the
arms  of profound repose,  the  sweet soother of his
jabors.    Hence  he  digresses  to  the subject of
dreams, and paints in vivid colors the horrid scenes
that disturb the mind during the  delirium of unquiet 
CRITICAL ESSAY.
21
slumber.  The proper period in which sleep is to
be indulged, with its due measure to different con-
stitutions, is next considered.  The  influence of
habit in this  respect, brings on  an exhortation to
proceed  very gradually in  altering every corporeal
habit;  and this is made an  introduction  to  a de-
scription of  the  successive  changes  of the year,
with the distempers they bring.    All  this, and the
remainder of the book, might perhaps with greater
propriety have made a part of the first head : since
its  connection with  exercise  is  less  obvious than
with  air.  To introduce, in some part of his plan,
an  account  of epidemic diseases, was,  however,
evidently proper, both as  a matter for  important
instruction respecting the preservation of  health,
and as affording scope  for poetical variety.   After
some common observations on the diseases of spring
and autumn, and the  means of  guarding  against
them, with  a forcible injunction  against  delay as
soon as symptoms of danger appear,  the  poet pro-
ceeds to an imitation of Virgil and Lucretius, in the
particular description of a pestilence ;  and he very
happily chooses  for his subject  the sweating sick-
ness, which  prevailed  first in England  when the 
22               CRITICAL ESSAY.
Earl of Richmond,  afterwards Henry VII., came
hither on his expedition against the tyrant Richard.
So many graphical descriptions in prose  and verse
have been made of  visitations of this kind, that
scarcely  any  source  of novelty  remained  in the
general circumstances accompanying them.  Dr.
Armstrong has therefore judiciously introduced  as
much as possible of the particular character of this
singular distemper, which, as far  as we learn, was
entirely unknown before, and has never appeared
since that period.  He  has not even  rejected cer-
tain popular errors prevalent respecting it, which,
though  they ought carefully to be  avoided in  a
medical treatise,  may  perhaps be  permitted  to
enhance the wonder of a poetical narration.   Such
is that which asserts Englishmen to have been its
only victims, both in their own country and abroad—
a notion which certainly adds to the  interest with
which a native of this  country reads  the relation.
The conclusion of this  book is a  close  copy from
Virgil in the design, suitably varied in the circum-
stances.  The deaths beyond the Atlantic allude  to
the unfortunate expedition to Carthagena—a popu-
lar topic of complaint at that period. 
CRITICAL  ESSAY.
23
  The title with which the fourth  and last book is
inscribed, is, the Passions ; but its subject  would
be  more  accurately expressed by the influence of
the mind  over the body—a  large  and  elevated
topic, detached from the  technical matter of any
particular  profession, and  in its  full  extent  com-
prising everything sublime and affecting in  moral
poetry.   The  theory of the union  of a spiritual
principle with the gross corporeal substance,  is that
which the writer adopts as the basis of his reason-
ings.   It is this ruling power which

        " Wields at his will the dull material world,
         And is the body's health or malady."

He evidently confounds, however, (as all writers
on  this system do,) matter of great subtilty, with
what is not  matter—or spirit.   These " viewless
atoms," he says, " are lost in thinking," yet thought
itself is not the enemy of life, but  painful thinking,
such as that proceeding from  anxious studies  and
fretful emotions.  To prevent  the  baneful  effects
of  these,  he counsels  us frequently to vary  our
objects, and to join the bodily exercise of reading
aloud, to the mental labor of meditation.  Solitary 
24               CRITICAL ESSAY.
brooding over thoughts of a particular kind, such,
especially, as pride or fear presents to the imagina-
tion, is warned against, in a passage full of energy,
as the  usual  parent  of madness or melancholy.
Sometimes what the poet terms a chronic passion,
or one arising from a misfortune which has made a
lasting impression, such  as  the loss of a  beloved
friend, produces a sympathetic languor in the body,
which can only be removed by shifting the scene,
and  plunging in  amusement  or business.  Some
persons, however,  take  a less innocent method of
dispelling grief,

       ------------" and in the tempting bowl
       Of poisoned nectar, sweet oblivion swill."

The immediately exhilarating effects, and the  sad
subsequent reverse attending this baneful practice,
are here  painted  in the most  vivid coloring, and
form a highly instructive and pathetic lesson. Par-
ticularly the gradual degradation of character which
it infallibly brings on, is finely touched.
   A kind of moral lecture succeeds, introduced as
the supposed precepts  of a  sage  in human life,
whose character  is  represented as a compound of 
CRITICAL ESSAY.
25
manly  sense and  cheerfulness.   How  to  acquire
happiness by moderation in the pursuit of pleasure,
and by the  practice of virtue, is  the  topic of this
passage,  which, though certainly  digressive, has
however a natural affinity with the leading subject
of the book.  Virtue has seldom been character-
ized with more spirit and dignity;  and  trite as the
sentiments  are, the energy  with which they are
expressed commands attention.
   The poet next reverts to his more direct purpose,
that of considering the passions in their influence
upon bodily health.  In general, he  lays  it down
as a rule, that all  emotions  which are  pleasing  to
the  mind,  are also salutary  to  the  body.   But
there  are  exceptions, some  being  in their nature
prone  to hurtful  excess;  as an  instance of which
he gives the passion of Love.  Here, again,  he
tries his  strength with Thomson ; and  his descrip-
tion cannot but remind the reader of  that fine pic-
ture of a love-sick youth, drawn by this writer in
his Spring.   Thomson, however,  dwells much more
minutely on the mental effects of love.  Armstrong,
with  propriety, fixes  the  attention more on the
changes it induces in the corporeal frame, and this, 
26
CRITICAL  ESSAY.
both as  it is a passion, and as it leads to sensual
indulgences.   With great force, yet with sufficient
delicacy, he  paints the condition of one unnerved
and exhausted by excess in amorous delights.  This,
indeed, is deviating from the express subject of the
book ;  since love as a passion, and the appetite for
sexual enjoyment, are  distinct  things—the  latter
being certainly able  to  subsist  without the former,
if not the former widiout the latter.  But an insen-
sible gradation  led him easily from the one to the
other.
   The  passion of Anger is his  next theme ; and
the bold personification with which he  has  intro-
duced it, is admirably suited to its violent and pre-
cipitate character.  A  fit of rage  ha"s frequently
been known at once  to overpower the vital facul-
ties, and strike with  instant   death.   To guard
against it was therefore a  point of  peculiar impor-
tance ; and the poet  has  presented many striking
moral  arguments  against the  indulgence of that
habit which makes us prone to  ungoverned sallies
of  this passion.   But  where  reason  proves too
weak for the control of this and other unruly  affec-
tions of  the  mind, to what  other power shall we 
CRITICAL  ESSAY.
27
resort for aid ?   We may, he hints, oppose passion
to passion, and extinguish one by its opposite.  But
without dwelling on  this contrivance, (which, in-
deed, is neither very philosophical nor manageable,)
he proceeds to recognize a power  in nature which
may be rendered the universal tranquillizer of the
breast; and this power is Music. With a contrasted
description of the music which exercises this sym-
pathetic  dominion  over the  emotions,  and  that
which  is only the  execution of difficult trifles, fol-
lowed  by an allusion to the fabulous stories of some
ancient masters, and the  praise of the art itself, the
poet somewhat  abruptly closes the book and the
work.
   From  this cursory view of the contents of Dr.
Armstrong's  piece,  it will  probably appear,  that
together  with a  sufficient variety for the purpose
of amusement, there is uniformity of design enough
to constitute the  proper character of a didactic
poem.    Almost everything  essential to the preser-
vation  of health  is touched upon during its course ;
and the digressive parts  are neither wholly imper-
tinent  to the  main  object,  nor do they occupy a
disproportionate  space. Many topics of an elevated 
28               CRITICAL ESSAY.
nature are  occasionally  introduced ;  and moral
sentiment is agreeably interwoven with precept and
description.   The  writer  has,  apparently, found
some difficulty in adhering  to the  arrangement of
his design ; for neither are  the  proposed topics of
the  four books equally copious  of matter, nor  has
he with precision confined  himself  to  the subjects
belonging to each.  However, as the real intention
of such a work is not to afford  systematic instruc-
tion, but  to  impress  the mind  with detached par-
ticulars,  and to amuse it with variety,  objections in
point of method are  little  to be regarded.  If this
performance, on  the  whole, offers a fund of useful
advice  and  rational  entertainment  to every culti-
 vated reader, and  at the  same time is in a good
 degree what  it professes  to be, it has fulfilled its
 purpose.
   It now remains to consider how  far this work is
 characterized by any peculiarity of style and man-
 ner. English blank verse in its structure approaches
 so  nearly to prose, that they who have  employed
 it on elevated subjects, have adopted a variety of
 methods  to  give  it the stamp of poetry.  Some
 have transplanted  as much as possible of the idiom 
CRITICAL ESSAY.              29
of the ancient languages into their own.  They
have  used  words  in  uncommon  senses,  derived
rather from etymology than practice ; and in the
formation of sentences,  they have studiously de-
viated from the natural order, and  copied the invo-
lutions  and inversions of the Latin  and Greek.
Others have  enriched their style with novel terms
and compound  epithets, and have aimed at  an
uncommon  mode of saying the commonest things.
Very different from these is the manner of Arm-
strong.  It is distinguished by its  simplicity—by a
free use of words which  owe their strength to their
 plainness^-by the rejection of ambitious ornaments,
 and a near approach to common phraseology.  His
 sentences  are generally short and easy, his sense
 clear and obvious.  The full extent of his concep-
 tions is  taken at the first glance ;  and there are no
 lofty mysteries  to be  unravelled by repeated peru-
 sal.   What keeps his language from being prosaic,
 is the vigor of his sentiments.  He thinks boldly,
 feels strongly, and therefore expresses himself  po-
 etically.   Where  the subject sinks, his style sinks
 with  it;  but he  has for the most  part excluded
 topics incapable  either of  vivid  description or of 
30
CRITICAL ESSAY.
the oratory of sentiment.  He had  from nature a
musical ear,  whence his lines are  scarcely ever
harsh, and are usually melodious, though apparently
without much study to render them  so.   Perhaps
he has not been careful  enough to avoid the mo-
notony  of making  several successive lines  close
with a rest or pause in the  sense.  On the whole,
it may not be too much to  assert, that no writer in
blank verse can be found more free  from stiffness
and  affectati6n, more energetic without harshness,
and more  dignified without  formality. 
THE
ART  OF  PRESERVING  HEALTH.
BOOK  I.
                      AIR.
Author's invocation  to the goddess, of health.  He advises his
  readers to shun the city—to avoid the stagnant marsh—too dry
  an air—to seek a proper medium.  Proper place for building.

Daughter of Paeon, queen of every joy,
Hygeia,^ whose indulgent smile  sustains
The various race luxuriant nature pours,
And on the immortal essences bestows
Immortal youth—auspicious, O descend !
Thou cheerful guardian of the rolling year,
Whether thou wanton'st on the western gale,

  * Hygeia, the goddess of health, was, according to the
genealogy of the heathen deities, the daughter of Esculapius;
who, as well as Apollo, was  distinguished by  the name of
Pseon. 
32
THE art of
Or shak'st the rigid pinions of the north,
Diffusest life and vigor through the tracts
Of air, through earth and ocean's deep domain.
When through the blue serenity of heaven
Thy power approaches, all the wasteful host
Of pain and sickness, squalid  and deformed,
Confounded, sink into the loathsome gloom,
Where, in deep Erebus involved, the fiends
Grow more profane.  Whatever shapes of death,
Shook from the hideous chambers of the globe,
Swim through the shuddering  air; whatever plagues,
Or meagre  famine breeds, or with slow wings
Rise from the putrid wat'ry element,
The damp,  waste forest, motionless and rank,
That smothers earth, and all her  breathless winds,
Or the  vile  carnage of the inhuman field ;
Whatever baneful breathes the rotten south ;
Whatever ills the  extremes or sudden change
Of cold and hot, or moist and dry produce ;
Then fly thy  pure effulgence; they, and  all
The secret  poisons of avenging heaven,
And all the pale tribes halting in their train
Of  vice and heedless pleasure; or if aught
The comet's glare amid the burning sky,
Mournful eclipse, or planets ill combined,
Portend disastrous to the vital world ; 
preserving health.
33
 Thy salutary power averts their rage—
 Averts the general bane :  and but for thee,
 Nature would sicken—nature soon would die.

    Without thy cheerful active energy,
 No rapture swells the breast, no poet sings,
 No more the maids of Helicon delight.
 Come then with me, O goddess, heavenly gay!
 Begin the song;  and let it sweetly flow,
 And let it wisely teach thy wholesome laws:
 " How best the fickle fabric to support
 Of mortal man;  in healthful body how
  A healthful mind the longest to maintain."
  'Tis hard in such a strife of rules,*1 to* choose
  The best, and those of most extensive use ;
  Harder in clear and animated song,
  Dry philosophic precepts to convey.
  Yet with thy aid the secret wilds  I trace
  Of nature, and with daring steps proceed
  Through paths the muses never trod before.    «

    * This is to  concede the truth of the saying—Who shall
  decide when doctors  disagree?  We do not believe there is
  such a " strife of rules "  among medical and dietetic writers
\  as is generally supposed.  Agreement is, in our opinion, the
  general rule ;  and disagreement only the exception.  A dili-
  gent perusal of this little poem has only strengthened in us
  this very conviction.
            3 
34                the art of

   Nor should I wander, doubtful of my way,
Had I the lights of that sagacious mind
Which taught to check the pestilential fire,
And quell the deadly Python of the  Nile.
0 thou, beloved by all the graceful arts,
Thou, long  the favorite of the healing powers,
Indulge, O Mead !* a well designed essay,
Howe'er imperfect;  and permit that I
My little knowledge with my country share,
Till you the rich Asclepian stores unlock,
And with new graces dignify the theme.

   Ye who amid this feverish world would wear
A body free of pain, of cares a mind,
Fly the rank city,t shun its turbid air ;
Breathe not the chaos of eternal smoke
And volatile corruption, from the dead,
The dying,  sickening, and the living world,
Exhaled, to  sully heaven's transparent dome

  * A distinguished physician, contemporary with our author.
  t Let those  who cannot " fly "  the city, however, labor to
improve it. Cities, instead of being the graves of the human
species, as Dr.  Gregory, another Scotch  medical  writer,
calls them, may be rendered comparatively comfortable and
healthful.  Dr. Armstrong had the eye of his mind on Euro-
pean cities, of course j not on Boston or New Haven. 
preserving  health.            35
With dim mortality.   It is not air
That from a thousand lungs reeks back to thine,
Sated with exhalations rank and fell,
The spoil of dunghills, and the putrid thaw
Of nature—when from shape and texture she
Relapses into fighting elements—
It is not air, but floats a nauseous mass
Of all obscene, corrupt, offensive things.
Much moisture hurts ;  but here a sordid bath,
With oily rancor fraught, relaxes more
The solid frame than simple moisture can.
Besides, immured in many a  sullen bay
That never felt the freshness  of the breeze,
This slumbering deep remains, and ranker grows
With sickly rest: and  (though the lungs abhor
To drink the dun fuliginous abyss)
Did not the acid vigor  of the  mine,
Rolled from so many thundering chimneys, tame
The putrid steams that overswarm the sky,
This caustic venom would perhaps corrode
Those tender cells that draw  the vital air,
In vain with all their unctuous rills bedewed;
Or by the drunken venous tubes, that yawn
In countless pores o'er all the pervious skin,
Imbibed, would poison  the balsamic blood, 
36                the art of
And rouse the heart to every fever's rage.
While yet you breathe, away ;* the rural wilds
Invite; the mountains call you, and the vales ;
The woods, the- streams, and each ambrosial breeze
That fans the ever undulating  sky—
A kindly sky ! whose fostering power regales
Man, beast, and all the vegetable reign.
Find then some woodland scene where nature smiles
Benign, where all her honest children thrive.
To  us there wants not many a happy seat.
Look round the smiling land, such  numbers rise,
We hardly fix, bewildered in our choice.
See where, enthroned in adamantine state,
Proud of her bards, imperial Windsor sits ;
There choose thy seat, in some aspiring grove,
Fast by the slowly winding Thames ;  or where
Broader she laves fair Richmond's  green retreats,
(Richmond, that sees an hundred villas rise
Rural or gay.)  0 ! from the summer's rage,
0 !  wrap me in the friendly gloom  that hides
Umbrageous Ham !   But if the busy town
Attract thee still to toil for power or gold,

  *  " Away," we would also say, when you can; but if you
cannot go away without too much sacrifice, try to make the
city and yourself better while you remain. 
preserving  health.
37
  Sweetly thou mayst thy vacant hours possess
  In Hampstead, courted by the western wind ;
  Or Greenwich, waving o'er the winding flood ;
  Or lose the world amid the sylvan wilds
  Of Dulwich, yet by barbarous arts unspoiled.
  Green rise the Kentish hills in cheerful air;
  But on the marshy plains that Essex spreads,
  Build not, nor rest too long thy wandering feet.
  For on a rustic throne of  dewy turf,
  With baneful fogs her aching temples bound,
  Quartana there presides ; • a meagre fiend
  Begot by Eurus, when his brutal force
  Compressed the slothful Naiad of the Fens.
  From such a mixture sprung, this fitful pest
* With feverish blasts subdues the sickening land :
  Cold tremors come, with mighty love of rest,
  Convulsive yawnings, lassitude, and pains
  That sting the burdened brows, fatigue the loins,
  And rack the joints, and every torpid limb ;
  Then parching heat succeeds, till copious sweats
  O'erflow—a short relief from former ills.
  Beneath repeated shocks the wretches pine ;
  The vigor sinks, the habit melts away;
  The cheerful, pure, and animated bloom
  Dies from the face, with squalid atrophy 
38                the art of
Devoured, in sallow melancholy clad.
And oft the Sorceress, in her sated wrath,
Resigns them to the furies of her train—
The bloated Hydrops, and the yellow fiend
Tinged with her own accumulated gall.

  In quest of sites, avoid the mournful plain
Where osiers thrive, and trees that love the lake ;
Where many lazy muddy rivers flow:
Nor, for the wealth that  all the Indies roll,
Fix near the marshy margin of the main.
For from the humid soil, and watery reign,
Eternal vapors rise ; the spongy air
Forever weeps ;  or turgid with the weight
Of waters, pours a sounding deluge  down.
Skies such as these let every mortal shun
Who dreads the dropsy, palsy, or the gout,
Tertian, corrosive scurvy, or moist catarrh;
Or any other injury that grows
From raw spun fibres idle and unstrung,
Skin ill perspiring, and  the purple flood
In languid'eddies loitering into phlegm.

  Yet not alone from humid skies we pine ;
For air may be too dry.   The subtle heaven, 
preserving health.
39
That winnows into dust the blasted downs,
Bare and extended wide without a stream,
Too fast imbibes th' attenuated lymph,
Which, by the surface, from the blood exhales.
The lungs grow rigid, and with toil essay
Their flexible vibrations;  or inflamed,
Their tender ever moving structure thaws.
Spoiled of its limpid vehicle, the blood
A mass of lees remains, a drossy tide
That slow as Lethe wanders through the veins ;
Unactive in the services of life,
Unfit to  lead its pitchy current through
The secret mazy channels of the brain.
The melancholic fiend, (that worst despair
Of physic,) hence the rust complexioned man
Pursues, whose blood is dry, whose fibres gain
Too stretched a tone : and hence, in climes adust,
So sudden tumults seize the trembling nerves,
And burning fevers glow with double rage.*

   Fly, if }'ou can, these violent extremes
Of air ;  the wholesome is nor moist nor dry.

  * We may admit the consequences of too dry an atmos-
phere to  be such  as are here described, without admitting
the doctor's theory, or mode of explaining the matter. 
40                THE  ART OF
But as the power of choosing is denied
To half mankind, a further task ensues;
How best to mitigate these fell extremes,
How breathe unhurt the withering element,
Or hazy atmosphere :  though custom moulds
To every clime the soft Promethean clay ;
And he who first the fogs of Essex breathed,
(So kind is native air) may in the fens
Of Essex from inveterate ills revive,
At pure Montpelier or Bermuda caught.
But if the raw and oozy heaven offend,
Correct the soil, and dry the sources up
Of watery exhalation; wide and deep
Conduct your  trenches through the quaking bog;
Solicitous, with all your winding arts,
Betray th' unwilling lake into the stream ;
And weed the forest, and invoke the winds
To break the toils where strangled vapors lie ;
Or through the thickets send the crackling flames.

   Meantime,  at home with cheerful fires dispel
The humid air : and let. your table smoke
With  solid roast or baked ;*  or what the herds

   * Dr. Armstrong was, of course, a flesh eater; though we
believe a temperate one. 
PRESERVING health.
41
Of tamer breed supply ; or what the wilds
Yield to the toilsome pleasures of the chase.
But neither these, nor all Apollo's arts,
Disarm the dangers of the dropping sky,
Unless with exercise and manly toil
You brace your nerves, and spur the lagging blood.
The fattening clime let all the sons  of ease
Avoid, if indolence would wish to live.
Go, yawn and loiter out the long slow year
In fairer skies.   If droughty regions parch
The skin and lungs, and bake the thickening blood,
Deep in the waving forest choose your seat,
Where fuming trees refresh the thirsty air,
And wake the fountains from their  secret beds,
And into lakes dilate  the rapid stream.
Here spread your gardens wide ;  and let the cool,
The moist relaxing vegetable store
Prevail in each repast: your food supplied
By bleeding life,* be gently wasted down,
By soft decoction and a mellowing  heat,

  * Ah, this bleeding life ! this it is—this shock to the moral
sensibilities of man, operating from  infancy  to age—that
 dwarfs our moral natures, benumbs and destroys our souls ;
and out of this consideration arises one of the strongest argu-
 ments  for its gradual disuse. 
42
THE  ART OF
To liquid balm ; or, if the solid mass
You choose, tormented in the boiling wave,
That through the thirsty channels of the blood ,
A smooth diluted chyle may ever flow.
The fragrant dairy from its cold recess
Its nectar acid or benign will pour
To drown your thirst; or let the mantling bowl
Of keen sherbet the fickle taste relieve.
For with the viscous blood the simple stream
Will hardly mingle;  and fermented cups
Oft dissipate more moisture than they give.
Yet when pale seasons rise, or winter rolls
His horrors o'er the world, thou mayst indulge
In feasts more genial, and impatient broach
The mellow cask.*   Then, too, the scourging air
Provokes to keener toils  than  sultry droughts
Allow.   But rarely we such skies blaspheme.
Steeped in continual rains, or with  raw fogs
Bedewed, our  seasons droop :  incumbent still
A ponderous heaven o'erwhelms  the sinking soul.
Laboring with storms in  heapy mountains rise

  * The  doctor, like  many  other writers on this subject,
gives such full and free  testimony in favor of water  as the
exclusive drink of the healthy, that such advice as the above,
incidentally applied, cannot be of much weight. 
PRESERVING  HEALTH.            43
Th' imbattled clouds, as if the Stygian shades
Had left the dungeon of eternal night,
Till black with thunder all the south descends.
Scarce in a showerless day the heavens indulge
Our melting clime, except the baleful east
Withers  the tender spring, and sourly checks
The fancy of the year.  Our fathers talk
Of summers, balmy airs, and skies serene;
And yet  for what unexpiated crimes
This dismal change !  The brooding elements,
Do they, your powerful ministers of wrath,
Prepare some fierce exterminating plague ?
Or is it fixed in the decrees above,
That lofty Albion melt into the main ?
Indulgent nature !  0 dissolve this gloom !
Bind in eternal adamant the winds
That drown or wither : give the genial west
To breathe, and  in its turn the sprightly north :
And may once more the circling seasons rule
The year ; nor mix in every monstrous day.

   Meantime, the moist malignity to shun
Of burthened skies, mark where the dry champaign
Swells into cheerful hills ; where marjoram
And thyme, the  love of bees, perfume the air; 
44                THE ART OF
And where the cynorrhodon* with the rose
For fragrance vies ; for in the thirsty soil
Most fragrant breathe the aromatic tribes.
There bid thy  roofs high on the basking steep
Ascend—there light thy hospitable fires.
And let  them see  the winter morn arise,
The summer evening blushing in the west;
While with umbrageous oaks the ridge behind  '
O'erhung, defends you from the blustering north,
And bleak affliction of the peevish east.
0 !  when the growling winds contend,  and all
The sounding  forest fluctuates in the storm,
To  sink in warm  repose, and hear the din
Howl o'er the  steady battlements, delights
Above the luxury of vulgar sleep.
The murmuring rivulet, and the  hoarser strain
Of  waters rushing o'er the slippery rocks,
Will nightly lull  you to ambrosial rest.
To  please the  fancy is no trifling good,
Where health  is studied ;  for whatever moves
The mind with calm delight, promotes  the just
And natural movements of th' harmonious frame.
Besides, the sportive brook forever shakes
The trembling air, that floats from hill to hill,

* The wild rose, or that which grows on the common briar. 
              PRESERVING HEALTH.            45

From vale to mountain, with incessant change
Of purest element, refreshing still,
Your airy seat and uninfected goods.
Chiefly for this 1 praise the man who builds
High on the breezy ridge, whose lofty sides
Th' ethereal deep with endless billows chafes.
His purer mansion nor contagious years
Shall reach, nor deadly putrid airs annoy.

   But may no fogs, from lake or fenny plain,
Involve my hill !  And wheresoe'er you build ;
Whether on sun-burnt Epsom, or the plains
Washed by the silent Lee ;  in Chelsea low,
Or high Blackheath with wintry winds assailed ;
Dry be your house; but airy more than warm.
Else every breath of ruder wind will strike
Your tender body through with rapid pains ;
Fierce  coughs will teaze you, hoarseness bind your
     voice,
Or moist Gravedo load your aching brows.
These to defy, and all the fates that dwell
In cloistered air tainted with steaming life,
Let lofty ceilings grace your ample rooms ;
 And still at azure noontide may your dome
At every window drink the liquid sky. 
46                THE ART, ETC.
   Need we the sunny situation here,
 And theatres open to the south, commend ?
 Here, where the morning's misty breath infests
 More than the torrid noon ?  How sickly grow,
 How pale, the plants in those ill-fated vales
 That, circled round with the  gigantic heap
 Of mountains, never felt, nor ever hope
 To feel, the genial vigor of the  sun !
 While on the neighboring hill the rose inflames
 The verdant spring; in virgin beauty blows
 The tender lily, languishingly sweet;
 O'er every hedge the wanton  woodbine roves,
 And autumn ripens in the summer's ray.
 Nor less the warmer living tribes demand
 The fostering sun, whose energy divine
 Dwells not in mortal fire ;  whose generous heat
 Glows through the mass of grosser elements,
 And kindles into life  the ponderous spheres.
 Cheered by thy kind  invigorating warmth,
 We court thy beams, great majesty of day!
If not the soul, the regent of this world,
First-born of  heaven, and only less than God  ! 
BOOK  II.
                      DIET.

Nature of digestion in general.   Liquid food.  Diseased flesh
 ' meat.  Extremes.  Food for different constitutions. Experience.
  To what extent  man is omnivorous.  Evils of mixed dishes.
  Simple dishes seldom offend.  Leanness of body.  Food to be
  adapted in some measure to the seasons, and to climates.  Boun-
  ties of nature in every clime.   Water extolled.  Some of the
  causes of disease.  Natural death.  Few attain to it.

Enough of air.   A  desert subject now,
Rougher and wilder, rises to my sight.
A barren waste, where not a garland grows
To bind the muse's brow ;  not even a proud
Stupendous solitude frowns o'er the heath,
To rouse a noble horror in the soul:
But rugged paths fatigue,  and error leads
Through endless labyrinths the  devious feet.
Farewell, ethereal fields !—the humbler arts
Of life, the table and the homely gods,
Demand my song.   Elysian gales, adieu! 
4S
THE ART OF
  The blood, the fountain whence the spirits flow,
The generous stream that waters  every part,
And motion, vigor, and warm life conveys
To  every particle that moves or lives—
This vital fluid, through unnumbered tubes
Poured by the heart, and to the heart again
Refunded ; scourged forever round and round ;
Enraged with heat and toil,  at last forgets
Its balmy nature ; virulent and thin
It grows ; and now, but that a thousand gates
Are open to its flight, it would destroy
The parts it cherished and repaired before.
Besides, the flexible and tender tubes
Melt in the mildest—most nectareous tide
That ripening nature rolls ;  as in the stream
Its crumbling banks ; but what the vital force
Of  plastic fluids hourly batters down,
That very force, those plastic particles
Rebuild—so mutable the  state of  man.
For this the watchful appetite was given,
Daily with fresh materials to repair
This unavoidable expense of life,
This necessary waste of flesh and blood.
Hence the concoctive powers, with various art,
Subdue the cruder aliments to chyle ; 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
49
The chyle to blood ; the foamy purple tide
To liquors which, through finer arteries,
To different parts their winding course pursue,
To try new changes, and new forms put on,
Or for the public, or some private use.

   Nothing so foreign but the athletic hind
Can labor into blood.   The hungry meal
Alone he fears, or aliments too thin,
By violent powers too easily subdued,
Too soon expelled.  His daily labor thaws
To friendly chyle, the most rebellious mass
That salt can harden,  or the smoke of years;
Nor does his gorge  the rancid bacon rue,
 Nor that which Cestria sends, tenacious paste
 Of solid milk.   But ye of softer clay,
 Infirm and delicate ! and ye who waste
With pale and bloated sloth the  tedious day !
Avoid the stubborn  aliment, avoid
 The full repast;  and let sagacious age
 Grow wiser, lessoned  by the dropping teeth.
 Half subtilized to chyle,  the liquid food*

   * This doctrine, that liquid food digests more readily than
solid food, is now, we believe, generally given up.  Liquids,
 as such, cannot be digested at all.  They are absorbed  with-
 out being digested.
           4 
50
THE  ART OF
Readiest obeys the assimilating powers ;
And soon the tender vegetable mass
Relents; and soon the young of those that tread
The steadfast earth, or cleave the green abyss,
Or pathless sky.  And if the steer must fall,
In youth and sanguine vigor let him die ; *
Nor stay till rigid age, or heavy ails,
Absolve him ill requited  from the yoke.
Some with high forage, and luxuriant ease,
Indulge the veteran ox ;  but wiser thou,
From the bald mountain  or  the barren downs,
Expect the flocks by frugal  nature fed—
A race of purer blood, with  exercise
Refined, and scanty fare  : for, old  or young,
The stalled are never healthy, nor the crammed.
Not all the culinary arts  can tame
To wholesome food, the  abominable growth
Of rest and gluttony ; the prudent taste
Rejects like bane such loathsome lusciousness.
The languid stomach curses even the pjure
Delicious fat, and all the race of oil:
For more the oily aliments relax

  * Nothing can be more just than what follows here.  We
say; if flesh must be eaten—" if the steer must fall"—let it
not be without the cautions of this paragraph. We have
seldom seen anything better. 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
51
Its feeble tone ; and with the eager lymph
(Fond to incorporate with all it meets)
Coyly they mix, and shun with slippery wiles
The wooed embrace.  Th.' irresoluble oil,
So gentle late and blandishing, in floods
Of rancid bile o'erflows.   What tumults hence,
What horrors rise, were nauseous to relate.
Choose leaner viands, ye whose jovial make
Too fast the gummy nutriment imbibes:
Choose sober meals, and rouse to active life
Your cumbrous clay ; nor on the enfeebling down,
Irresolute, protract the morning hours.
But  let the man  whose bones are thinly clad,
With cheerful ease and  succulent repast
Improve his slender habit.   Each extreme
From the blest mean of sanity departs.*

  I could relate  what table this demands,
Or that complexion ; what the various powers
Of  various foods ; but fifty years would roll,
And fifty more, before the tale were done.
Besides, there often lurks some nameless, strange,
Peculiar thing;  nor on the skin displayed,

  *  Our author seems, however, to be a little too fearful of
leanness. 
52
THE  ART OF
Felt in the pulse', nor in the habit seen,
Which finds a poison in the food that most
The temperature affects.   There are, whose blood
Impetuous rages through the turgid veins,
Who better bear the fiery fruits of Ind,
Than the moist melon, or pale cucumber.*
Of chilly nature, others fly  the board
Supplied with slaughter, and the vernal powers
For cooler, kinder sustenance implore.
Some even the generous nutriment detest
Which, in the shell, the sleeping embryo rears.
Some, more unhappy still, repent the gifts
Of Pales—soft, delicious and benign :
The  balmy quintessence of every flower,
And every grateful herb that decks the spring :
The  fostering dew of tender sprouting life ;
The  best refection of declining age ;
The  kind  restorative of those who lie
Half dead and panting, from the doubtful strife
Of nature struggling in the grasp of death.

  * We do not think this is sound  reasoning.  First, these
varieties of  habit are often  acquired, rather than natural.
Secondly, whether natural or  acquired, we think there is
danger in feeding those  whose temperament is hot, with
heating food.  Contraries seem to  us more  generally indi-
cated. 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
53
Try all the bounties of this fertile globe,
There is not such a salutary food
As suits with every stomach.*  But (except
Amid the mingled mass of fish and fowl,
And boiled and baked, you hesitate by which
You sunk oppressed, or whether not by all;)
Taught by experience t soon you may discern
What pleases, what offends.  Avoid the cates
That lull the sickened appetite too long;
Or heave with feverish flushings all the face,
Burn in the palms, and parch the roughening tongue;
Or much diminish  or too  much increase
The expense, which nature's wise  economy,
Without or waste or avarice, maintains.
Such cates abjured, let prowling hunger loose,
And bid the curious palate roam at will;
They scarce can err amid the various stores
That burst the teeming entrails of the world.

   Led by sagacious taste, the ruthless king
Of beasts on blood and slaughter  only lives;

   * Plain bread, of almost every kind, and the more simple
fruits, agree with every healthy stomach in a natural state.
   f Experience cannot always be trusted.  We must correct
our experience by that of others, or by science. 
54                 THE ART  OF
The tiger, formed alike to cruel meals,
Would at the manger starve: of milder seeds,
The generous horse to herbage and to grain
Confines his wish ; though fabling Greece resound
The Thracian steeds with human carnage wild.
Prompted by  instinct's never erring power,
Each creature knows  its proper aliment;
But man, the inhabitant of every clime,
With all the commoners of nature feeds.*  >
Directed, bounded by  this  power within,
Their cravings are well aimed : voluptuous man
Is by superior faculties misled :
Misled from pleasure  even in quest of joy.
Sated with nature's boons, what thousands seek,
With dishes tortured from their native taste,
And mad variety, to spur beyond
Its  wiser will the jaded appetite !
Is this for pleasure ?   Learn a juster taste ;
And know, that  temperance is true luxury.
Or  is it pride ?   Pursue some nobler aim.
Dismiss your parasites, who praise for hire,
And earn the fair esteem of honest men,

  *  That is, has the capacity  and the  power to do so.  His
reason is given him, however, for the purpose, among others,
of selecting the best. 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
55
Whose praise is fame. Formed of such clay as yours,
The sick, the famished, shiver at your gates.
Even modest want may bless your hand unseen,
Though hushed in patient wretchedness at home.
Is there no virgin, graced with every charm
But that which binds the mercenary vow ?
No youth of genius, whose neglected bloom,
Unfostered, sickens in the barren shade ?
No worthy man, by fortune's random blows,
Or  by a heart too generous and humane,
Constrained to leave his happy natal seat,
And sigh for wants more bitter than his own ?
There are,  while human miseries abound,
A thousand w^ays to waste superfluous wealth,
Without one fool or flatterer at your board—
Without one hour of sickness or disgust.

  But other ills the ambiguous feast pursue,
Besides provoking  the lascivious taste.
Such various foods, though harmless each alone,
Each other violate  ; and oft we see
What strife is brewed, and what pernicious bane,
From combinations  of innoxious things.*

  *  This is sound doctrine.  It is one of the best paragraphs
of the whole poem. 
56
THE ART OF
The unbounded taste I mean not to confine
To hermit's diet, needlessly severe :
But would you long the sweets of  health enjoy,
Or husband pleasure, at one impious meal
Exhaust not half the bounties of the year,
Of every realm.  It matters not meanwhile
Haw much to-morrow differ from to-day;
So far indulge : 't is fit, besides, that man,
To change obnoxious, be to change inured.
But stay the curious appetite, and taste
With caution fruits you never tried before.
For want of use, the kindest aliment
Sometimes offends ; while custom  tames the rage
Of poison to mild amity with life.

   So heaven has formed us to the  general taste
Of all  its gifts—so custom has improved
This bent of nature—that few simple foods,
Of all  that earth, or air, or ocean yield,
But by excess offend.*  Beyond the sense
Of light refection, at the genial board
Indulge not often ; nor protract the feast

  " This is  not very far from the truth. And  yet of these
simples  which do  not offend, some may be far better for us—
that is, do us much more good—than others. 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
57
To dull satiety, till soft and slow
A drowsy death creeps on, the expansive soul
Oppressed, and smothered the celestial fire.
The stomach, urged beyond its active tone,
Hardly to nutrimental chyle subdues
The softest food :  unfinished and depraved,
The chyle, in all its future wanderings, owns
Its turbid fountain ; not by purer streams
So to be cleared, but foulness will remain.
To sparkling wine what ferment can exalt
The unripened grape ?  Or what mechanic skill
From the crude ore can spin  the ductile gold ?

  Gross riot  treasures up a wealthy fund
Of plagues :  but more immedicable ills
Attend the lean extreme.*  For physic knows
How to disburden the too tumid veins,
Even how to ripen the half-labored blood :
But  to unlock the elemental tubes,
Collapsed and shrunk with long inanity,
And with balsamic nutriment repair
The dried and  worn out habit,  were to bid

  *  Dr. Armstrong, however, as we have already seen, in-
clined to the corpulent habit.  He seems to have adopted the
popular  notion that plumpness and rosy cheeks are the in-
dices of health. 
58                THE ART OF
Old age grow green, and wear a second spring;
Or the tall ash, long ravished from the soil,
Through withered veins imbibe the vernal dew.
When hunger calls, obey ; nor often wait
Till hunger sharpen  to corrosive pain :
For the keen appetite will feast beyond
What nature well can bear ; and one extreme
Ne'er without danger meets its own reverse.
Too greedily the exhausted veins absorb
The recent chyle, and load enfeebled powers
Oft to the extinction of the vital flame.
To the pale cities, by the firm set siege
And famine humbled, may this verse be borne ;
And hear, ye hardiest sons that Albion breeds,
Long  tossed and famished on the wintry main ;
The war shook off, or hospitable shore
Attained, with temperance bear the shock of joy,
Nor crown with festive rites the auspicious day :
Such feast might prove more fatal than the waves—
Than  war or famine.  While the vital fire
Burns feebly, heap not the green fuel on :
But prudently foment the wandering spark
With what the soonest feels its kindred touch:
Be frugal even of that:  a little give
At first;  that kindled, add a little more j 
PRESERVING  HEALTH.
59
Till, by deliberate nourishing, the flame,
Revived, with all its wonted vigor glows.

  But though the two (the full and the jejune)
Extremes have each their vice, it much avails
Ever with gentle tide to ebb and flow
From this to that:  so nature learns to bear
Whatever chance or headlong appetite
May bring.*  Besides, a meagre day subdues
The cruder clods by sloth  or luxury
Collected ; and unloads the wheels of life.
Sometimes a coy aversion to  the feast
Comes on, while yet no blacker omen lowers:
Then is a time to shun the tempting  board,
Were it your natal  or your nuptial day.
Perhaps  a fast so seasonable starves
The latent seeds of wo, which, rooted once,
Might cost you labor.   But the day returned
Of  festal luxury, the wise indulge
Most in the  tender vegetable breed :
Then chiefly when  the summer beams inflame
The brazen heavens, or angry Sirius  sheds

  *  She learns to bear  it, indeed ; but in so far as she learns
to bear what is not good for the system, it  is at the expense
of the vital powers. 
60                THE ART OF
A feverish taint through the still gulf of air.
The moist, cool viands then, and flowing cup
From the fresh dairy virgin's liberal hand,
Will  save your  head from harm, though round the
       world
The dreaded Causos* rolls his wasteful fires.
Pale humid  winter loves the generous board,
The meal more copious, and a warmer fare ;
And longs, with  old wood and old wine.t to cheer
His quaking heart.   The seasons which divide
The empires of heat and cold, by neither claimed—
Influenced by both—a middle regimen
Impose.  Through autumn's languishing domain
Descending, nature by degrees invites
To glowing  luxury.   But from the depth
Of winter, when th' invigorating year
Emerges—when Favonius, flushed with love,
Toyful and  young, in every breeze descends
More warm  and wanton on his kindling bride—
Then, shepherds, then begin to spare your flocks,
And learn, with  wise humanity, to check

  * The burning fever.
  t This is the old doctrine.  This old wine, and cider, and
flesh meat of winter, is the cause of many of the evils we
suffer in the spring. 
PRESERVING HEALTH.             61
The lust of blood.   Now pregnant earth commits
A various offspring to the indulgent sky:
Now bounteous nature feeds with lavish hand
The prone creation—yields what once sufficed
Their dainty sovereign, when the world was young,
Ere yet the barbarous thirst of blood had seized
The human breast.   Each  rolling month matures
The food that suits it most; so does each clime.

   Far in the horrid realms  of winter, v/here
The established ocean heaps a monstrous waste
Of shining rocks and mountains to  the pole,
There lives a hardy race, whose plainest wants
Relentless earth, their cruel step-mother,
Regards not.   On  the waste of iron fields,
Untamed,  intractable, no harvests wave :
Pomona hates them, and the clownish god
Who tends the garden.   In this frozen world
Such cooling gifts  were vain :  a fitter meal
Is earned with ease ;* for here the  fruitful spawn

   * Rather, this is the only food the  inhabitants can obtain,
whether fit or  not.   But they  seem to us to be out of place.
We doubt whether men have any business—morally speak-
ing—in these polar regions, till the central regions of the
earth are more  thickly settled. But even in cold  regions,
vegetables would be preferable  if they could be obtained. 
62
THE ART OF
Of ocean swarms, and heaps their genial board
With generous fare and luxury profuse.
These are their bread, the only bread they know—
These, and their willing slave, the deer, that crops
The  shrubby herbage on their meagre hills.
Girt  by the burning zone, not thus the south
Her  swarthy sons in either Ind maintains,
Or thirsty Libya, from whose fervid loins
The  lion bursts,  and every fiend that roams
The  affrighted wilderness.  The mountain herd,
Adust and dry, no sweet repast affords ;
Nor  does the tepid main such kinds produce,
So perfect, so delicious, as the shoals
Of icy Zembla.  Rashly, where the blood
Brews feverish frays—where scarce the tubes sustain
Its tumid fervor and tempestuous course—
Kind nature tempts not to such gifts as these.
But  here in  livid ripeness melts the grape ;
Here, finished by invigorating suns,
Through the green shade the golden  orange glows ;
Spontaneous here the turgid melon yields
A generous  pulp ; the coco swells on high
With milky riches ; and in  horrid mail
The  crisp ananas wraps its poignant sweets.
Earth's vaunted  progeny !  In ruder air 
PRESERVING  HEALTH.            63
Too coy to flourish—even too proud to live;
Or hardly raised by artificial fire
To vapid life.   Here, with a mother's smile,  '
Glad Amalthea pours a copious horn.
Here buxom Ceres reigns.  The autumnal sea
In boundless billows  fluctuates o'er their plains.
What suits the climate best, what suits  the men,
Nature profuses most, and most the taste
Demands.  The fountain, edged with racy wine
Or acid fruit, bedews their thirsty souls.
The breeze, eternal breathing round their limbs,
Supports in else intolerable air :
While the cool palm, the plantain, and the grove
That waves on gloomy Lebanon, assuage
The torrid hell that beams upon their heads.

  Now come,  ye Naiads, to the fountains lead;
Now let me wander through your gelid reign.
I burn to view the enthusiastic wilds
By  mortal else untrod.  I hear the din
Of waters thundering o'er the ruined cliffs.
With holy reverence I approach the rocks
Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song.
Here from the desert down the rumbling steep
First springs  the Nile ; here bursts the  sounding Po 
64
THE ART OF
In angry waves; Euphrates hence devolves
A mighty flood to water half the east;
And there, in Gothic solitude reclined,
The cheerless Tanais pours his hoary urn.
What solemn twilight!   What stupendous shades
Enwrap these infant floods! Through every nerve
A sacred horror thrills—a pleasing fear
Glides o'er my frame.  The forest deepens round ;
And, more gigantic still, the impending trees
Stretch their extravagant arms athwart the gloom.
Are these the confines of some fairy world ?
A land of Genii ?  Say, beyond these wilds
What unknown nations ?  if indeed beyond
Aught habitable lies.  And whither leads,
To what  strange regions, or of bliss or pain,
That subterraneous way ?  Propitious maids,
Conduct me, while with fearful steps I tread
This trembling ground.  The task remains to sing
Your gifts (so Pajon, so the powers of health
Command) to praise your crystal element:
The chief ingredient in heaven's various works ;
Whose flexile genius sparkles in the gem,
Grows firm in oak, and fugitive in wine ;
The vehicle, the source of nutriment
And life, to all that vegetate or live. 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
65
  0 comfortable streams!   With eager lips
And trembling hand the languid thirsty quaff
New life in you ; fresh vigor fills their veins.
No warmer cups the rural ages knew;
None warmer sought the sires of human kind.
Happy in temperate peace !—their equal days
Felt not the alternate fits of feverish mirth
And sick dejection.  Still serene and pleased,
They knew no  pains but what the tender soul
With pleasure yields to, and would ne'er forget.
Blest with divine immunity  from ails,
Long centuries  they lived ;  their only fate
Was ripe old age, and rather sleep than death.
Oh! could those worthies from the world of gods
Return  to visit  their degenerate  sons,
How would they scorn the joys of modern time,
With all our art and toil improved to pain !
Too happy they !   But wealth brought luxury,
And luxury on  sloth begot disease.

   Learn temperance, friends, and hear without disdain
The choice of water.*  Thus the Coant sage

  * How is it that those who  talk so nobly and reason so
well on water, can descend afterward to dalliance with wine ?
  t Hippocrates.
          5 
66
THE ART OF
 Opined, and thus the learned of every school.
 What least of foreign principles partakes
 Is best:  the lightest then—what bears the touch
 Of fire the least, and soonest mounts in  air—
 The most insipid—the most void of smell.
 Such the rude mountain from his horrid sides
 Pours down; such waters in the sandy vale
 Forever boil, alike of winter frosts
 And summer's heat secure.   The crystal stream,
 Through rocks resounding, or for many a mile
 O'er the chafed pebbles hurled, yields wholesome, pure
 And mellow draughts ; except when winter thaws,
 And half the mountains melt into the  tide.
 Though thirst were ne'er so resolute, avoid
 The sordid lake, and all such drowsy  floods
 As fill from Lethe Belgia's slow canals—
 (With rest corrupt, with vegetation green,
 Squalid with  generation, and the birth
 Of little monsters)—till the power of fire
Has from profane embraces disengaged
 The violated lymph.   The virgin stream
In boiling wastes its finer soul in air.

  Nothing like simple element dilutes
The food, or gives the chyle so soon to flow.
But where the stomach, indolently given, 
PRESERVING  HEALTH.            67
Toys with its duty, animate with wine
The insipid  stream : *  though golden Ceres yields
A more voluptuous, a more sprightly draught;
Perhaps more active.   Wine unmixed, and all
The gluey floods that from the vexed abyss
Of  fermentation spring, with spirit fraught,
And furious with intoxicating fire,
Retard concoction, and  preserve unthawed
The embodied mass. You see what countless years;
Embalmed in fiery quintessence of wine,
The puny wonders of the reptile world,
The tender rudiments of life, the slim
Unravellings of minute anatomy,
Maintain their  texture, and unchanged remain.

  What dexterous thousands, just within the goal
Of  wild debauch, direct their nightly course !
Perhaps no sickly  qualms bedim their days,
No morning admonitions shock the head :
But ah ! what woes remain !   Life rolls apace,
And that incurable disease, old age,
In youthful bodies more severely felt,
More sternly active, shakes their blasted prime :

  •  And yet it will but make the stomach, in  the end, the
more indolent. How is it that medical men so often over-
look this fact ? 
68                  THE ART  OF

Except kind nature by  some hasty blow
Prevent the lingering fates.   For know, whate'er
Beyond its natural fervor hurries on
The sanguine tide—whether  the frequent bowl,
High seasoned fare,  or  exercise to toil
Protracted—spurs to its last stage tired life,
And sows the temples with untimely snow.
When life is  new, the ductile fibres  feel
The heart's increasing  force ; and, day by day,
The growth advances ;  till  the larger tubes,
Acquiring (from their elemental veins,*
Condensed to solid chords)  a firmer tone,
Sustain, and just sustain, the  impetuous blood.
Here stops  the growth.   With overbearing pulse

  * Dr. Armstrong  held that in human bodies, as well as
in those of other animals,  the larger blood vessels are com-
posed of smaller ones ; and that  by the violent motion and
pressure of the  fluids in the large vessels, they lose their
cavities by degrees, and degenerate into  impervious  cords
or fibres.  In proportion as these small vessels become solid,
the larger, it was thought, must of course grow less extensile,
more rigid, and make a stronger  resistance to the action of
the heart and force of the blood.  From this gradual conden-
sation of the smaller vessels, and consequent rigidity of the
larger ones, the progress of the human body from infancy to
old age was  supposed to be accounted for.  We think there
are other and more important causes of old age, but the limits
of this work do  not permit us to enter upon the discussion of
this subject. 
PRESERVING  HEALTH.
69
And pressure, still the great destroy the small;
Still with the ruins of the small grow strong.
Life glows meantime, amid the grinding force
Of viscous fluids and elastic tubes ;
Its various functions  vigorously are plied
By strong machinery ; and in solid health
The man confirmed long triumphs o'er disease.
But the full ocean ebbs :  there is a point,
By nature fixed, whence  life must downwards tend.
For still the beating  tide  consolidates
The stubborn vessels, more reluctant still
To the weak throbs of the ill supported heart.
This languishing, these strengthening by degrees
To hard,  unyielding, wnelastic bone,
Through tedious channels the congealing flood
Crawls lazily, and hardly wanders on ;—
It loiters  still: and now  it stirs no more.
This is the period few attain—the death
Of nature ; thus (so heaven ordained it)  life
Destroys itself; and could these laws have changed,
Nestor might now the fates of Troy relate ;
And Homer live immortal as  his song.

   What does not fade ? The tower that long had stood
The crush of thunder and the warring winds,
Shook by the slow but sure destroyer, Time, 
70
THE ART, ETC.
Now hangs in doubtful ruins o'er its base :
And flinty pyramids, and walls of brass,
Descend :  the Babylonian spires are sunk :
Achaia, Rome and Egypt moulder down.
Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones,
And tottering empires rush by their own weight.
This huge rotundity we tread grows old ;
And all those worlds that roll around the sun—
The sun himself—shall die ; and ancient night
Again involve the desolate abyss  :
Till the great Father through the lifeless gloom
Extend his arm to light another world,
And bid new planets roll by other laws.
For through the regions  of unbounded space,
Where unconfined omnipotence has room,
Being, in various systems, fluctuates still
Between creation and abhorred decay:
It ever did ; perhaps and ever will.
New  worlds are still emerging from the deep ;
The old descending,  in their turns to rise. 
BOOK  III.
                    EXERCISE.

 Case of the hard laborer.  Effects of toil on the bodily organs.
   Virtues of the  chase.  Gardening.  We should, if possible, in-
   dulge our taste.  Exercise of the different parts of the body.
   Begin physical exercise moderately.  Cooling suddenly when
   over-heated.   Warm bathing.  Cold  bathing.   Physical and
   moral benefits  of cleanliness.  Diseases produced by errors in
   regard to study. Physical changes should be gradual. Epidemic
   diseases.  Sweating sickness of England.  Its horrors depicted.

 Through various toils the adventurous muse has past;
 But half the toil, and more  than half, remains.
 Rude  is her theme, and hardly fit for song;
 Plain, and of  little ornament;  and I
 But little practised in the Aonian arts.
 Yet not in vain such labors have we tried,
 If aught these lays the fickle health confirm.
 To you, ye delicate, I write ;  for you
I tame my youth to philosophic cares,
And grow still paler by the midnight lamps. 
72
THE ART OF
Not to debilitate with timorous rules
A hardy frame, nor needlessly to brave
Unglorious dangers, proud of mortal strength,
Is all the lesson that in wholesome years
Concerns the strong.   His care were ill bestowed
Who would with warm effeminacy nurse
The thriving oak, which, on the mountain's brow,
Bears all the blasts that sweep the wintry heaven.

  Behold the laborer of the glebe, who toils
In dust, in rain, in cold and sultry skies.
Save but the grain from mildews and the flood,
Nought anxious he what sickly stars  ascend.
He knows no laws by Esculapius given—
He studies none.   Yet him nor midnight fogs
Infest, nor those envenomed shafts that fly
When rabid Sirius fires the autumnal noon.
His habit pure, with plain and temperate meals,
Robust with labor, and by custom steeled
To every casualty of varied life—
Serene he bears the peevish eastern blast,
And uninfected breathes the mortal south.

  Such the  reward of rude and sober life;
Of labor such.   By health, the peasant's toil 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
73
Is well repaid, if exercise were pain
Indeed, and temperance pain.   By arts like these
Laconia nursed of old her hardy sons;
And Rome's unconquered legions urged their way,
Unhurt, through every toil, in every clime.

  Toil, and be strong.  By toil the flaccid nerves
Grow firm, and gain a more compacted tone ;
The greener juices are by  toil subdued,
Mellowed, and subtilized;  the vapid old
Expelled, and all the rancor of the blood.
Come, my companions, ye who feel the  charms
Of nature and the year ; come, let us stray
Where chance or fancy leads our roving walk:
 Come, while the  soft voluptuous breezes fan
 The fleecy heavens, enwrap the limbs with balm,
 And shed a charming languor o'er the soul.
 Nor when bright winter sows with prickly frost
 The vigorous ether, in unmanly warmth
 Indulge at home; nor even when Eurus'blasts
 This way and that convolve the laboring woods.
 My liberal walks, save when the skies in rain
 Or fogs relent, no season should confine
 Or to the cloistered gallery or arcade.
 Go, climb the mountain—from the  ethereal source 
74
THE ART OF
Imbibe the recent gale.   The  cheerful morn
Beams o'er the hills; go, mount the exulting steed.
Already, see, the deep-mouthed beagles catch
The tainted mazes, and on eager sport
Intent, with emulous impatience try
Each  doubtful trace.  Or if a nobler prey
Delight you more, go chase the desperate deer,
And through its deepest solitudes awake
The vocal forest with the jovial horn.

  But if the breathless  chase o'er hill and dale
Exceed your strength, a sport of less  fatigue,
Not less delightful, the  prolific stream
Affords.  The crystal rivulet,  that o'er
A stony channel  rolls its rapid maze,
Swarms with the silver fry. Such, through the bounds
Of pastoral Stafford, runs the  brawling Trent;
Such  Eden, sprung from Cumbrian mountains; such
The Esk, o'erhung with woods; and such the stream
On whose Arcadian banks I first drew air—
Liddel—till now, except in Doric lays
Tuned to her murmurs  by her love-sick swains,
Unknown in song : though not a purer stream,
Through meads more flowery or romantic groves
Rolls  toward the western main.  Hail, sacred flood! 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
75
May still thy hospitable swains be blest
In rural innocence ;  thy mountains still
Teem with the fleecy race ; thy tuneful woods
Forever flourish; and thy vales look gay
With painted meadows, and the golden grain.
Oft, with thy blooming sons, when life was new,
Sportive and petulant, and charmed with toys,
In thy transparent eddies have I laved ;
Oft traced with patient steps thy fairy banks,
With the well-imitated fly to hook
The eager trout, and with the slender line
And yielding rod solicit to the shore
The struggling, panting prey; while vernal clouds
And tepid gales obscured the ruffled pool,
And from the deeps called forth the wanton swarms.

   Formed on the Samian school,  or those of Ind,
There are  who think these pastimes scarce humane.
Yet in my mind, (and not relentless I,)
His life is pure that wears no fouler stains.*
But if through genuine tenderness of heart,

  * This may be true.  And  yet it were still better to have
no stains at all on the character.  I  believe the moral ten-
dency of the chase is far from being salutary.  But Dr. A.
himself alludes to nobler recreations in the lines which follow
close upon the above. 
76
THE ART OF
Or secret want of relish for the game,
You shun the glories of the chase, nor care
To haunt the peopled stream, the garden yields
A soft amusement, an humane delight.
To raise the insipid  nature of the ground,
Or tame its savage genius to the grace
Of careless sweet rusticity, that seems
The amiable result of happy chance,
Is to create ; and gives a god-like joy,
Which every year improves.  Nor thou disdain
To check the lawless riot of the trees, '
To plant the grove, or turn the barren mould.
0 happy he! whom, when his years decline,
(His fortune and his fame by worthy means
Attained, and equal  to his moderate mind,
His life approved by all the wise and good,
Even envied by the  vain,) the peaceful groves
Of  Epicurus, from this  stormy world,
Receive to rest;  of all ungrateful cares
Absolved, and sacred from the selfish crowd.
Happiest  of men ! if the same soil invites
A chosen few, companions of his youth,
Once fellow-wits perhaps, now rural friends,
With whom in easy commerce to pursue
Nature's free charms, and vie for sylvan fame— 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
77
A fair ambition, void of strife or guile,
Or jealousy, or pain to be outdone.
Who plans the enchanted garden, who directs
The vista best, and best conducts the stream ;
Whose  groves the fastest thicken and ascend;
Whom  first the welcome spring salutes ; who shows
The earliest bloom, the sweetest, proudest charms
Of Flora ; who best gives Pomona's juice
To match the sprightly genius of champaigne.
Thrice  happy days ! in rural business past.
Blest winter nights ! when, as the genial fire
Cheers the wide  hall, his cordial family
With soft domestic arts the hours beguile,
And pleasing talk that starts no timorous fa»*, l&TA.
With witless wantonness to hunt it down:
 Or through the fairy-land of tale or song
 Delighted wander, in fictitious fates
 Engaged, and all that strikes humanity :
 Till, lost in fable, they the stealing  hour
 Of timely rest forget.   Sometimes, at eve,
 His neighbors lift the latch, and bless unbid
 His festal roof;  while, o'er the light repast,
 And sprightly cups, they mix in social joy ;
 And, through the maze of conversation, trace
 Whate'er amuses or improves the mind. 
78
THE ART OF
Sometimes at eve, (for I delight to taste
The native zest and flavor of the fruit,
Where sense grows wild and takes of no manure,)
The decent, honest, cheerful husbandman
Should drown  his labors in my friendly bowl;
And at my table find himself at home.*

  Whate'er you study, in whate'er you sweat,
Indulge you taste.   Some love the manly foils,
The tennis some, and some the graceful dance.
Others, more hardy, range the  purple heath
Or naked  stubble, where from field to field
The sounding  coveys urge their laboring flight,
Eager^mid the rising cloud to pour
The gun's unerring thunder.  And there are
Whom still  the meed of the  green archer charms.
He  chooses best, whose labor entertains
His vacant fancy most.  The toil you hate
Fatigues you soon, and scarce  improves your limbs.

  As  beauty still has blemish,  and the mind
The most accomplished its imperfect side,

  *  These  " sprightly  cups," and " friendly bowls,"  and
tables  of late evening hours, are very fruitful of disease.  It
is far better to taste  no pleasures but moral and mental for
the last three or  four hours before going to bed. 
PRESERVING  HEALTH.
79
Few bodies are there of that happy mould
But some one part is weaker than the rest:
The legs perhaps, or arms refuse their load,
Or the chest labors.  These assiduously,
But gently, in their proper arts employed,
Acquire a vigor and springy activity
To which they were not born.  But weaker parts
Abhor fatigue and violent discipline.

   Begin with gentle toils ; and, as your nerves
Grow firm, to hardier by just steps aspire.
The prudent, even in every moderate walk,
 At first but saunter ; and by slow degrees
 Increase  their pace.   This doctrine of the wise
 Well knows the master of the flying steed.
 First from the goal the managed coursers play
 On bended reins, as yet the skilful  youth
 Repress their foamy pride ; but every breath
 The race grows warmer,  and  the tempest swells,
 Till all the fiery mettle has its way,
 And the  thick thunder hurries o'er  the plain.
 When all at once from indolence to toil
 You spring, the fibres by the hasty shock
 Are tired and cracked, before their unctuous  coats,
 Compressed, can pour the lubricating balm. 
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THE ART OF
Besides, collected in the passive veins,
The purple mass a sudden torrent rolls,
O'erpowers the heart, and deluges the lungs
With dangerous  inundation;—oft the source
Of fatal woes ; a cough that foams with blood,
Asthma, and feller peripneumony,
Or the slow minings of the hectic  fire.

  The athletic fool, to whom what heaven denied
Of soul is well compensated in limbs,
Oft from his rage, or brainless frolic, feels
His vegetation and brute force decay.
The men of better clay and finer mould
Know nature, feel the human dignity,
And scorn to vie with oxen or with apes.
Pursued prolixly, even the gentlest toil
Is waste of health; repose by small fatigue
Is earned;  and (where your habit is not prone
To  thaw) by the first moisture of  the brows,
The fine and subtle spirits cost too much
To  be profused, too much the roscid balm.
But when the hard varieties of life
You toil to learn, or try the dusty chase,
Or  the warm deeds of some important day—
Hot from the field, indulge not yet your limbs 
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81
In wished repose, nor court the fanning gale,
Nor taste the spring.   O ! by the sacred tears
Of widows, orphans, mothers, sisters, sires,
Forbear ! No other pestilence has driven
Such myriads o'er the irremeable deep.
Why this so fatal, the sagacious muse
Through nature's cunning labyrinths could trace ;
But there are  secrets which, who knows not now,
Must, ere he reach them, climb the heapy Alps
Of science, and devote seven years to toil.*
Besides, I would not stun your patient ears
With what it  little boots you to attain.
He knows enough, the mariner, who knows
Where lurk the shelves, and where the whirlpools boil,
What signs portend the storm.  To subtler  minds
He leaves to scan, from what mysterious cause
Charybdis rages in the Ionian  wave;
Whence those impetuous currents in the main,
Which neither oar nor sail can stem ;  and why
The roughening deep expects the  storm, as  sure
As red Orion  mounts the shrouded heaven.

   * Probably he would be willing that" seven years " of toil
should be given to  the learned languages.  But would not
the same time, given  to the knowledge to which he here
refers, be far more valuable ? Seven years, however, are not
required for the purpose.
           6 
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THE ART OF
   In ancient times, when Rome with Athens vied
 For polished luxury and useful arts,
 All hot and reeking from the Olympic strife,
 And warm Palestra, in the tepid bath
 The athletic youth relaxed their wearied limbs.
 Soft oils bedewed them, with the grateful powers
 Of nard and cassia fraught, to soothe and heal
 The cherished nerves.  Our less voluptuous clime
 Not much invites us to such arts as these.
 'T is not for those, whom gelid  skies embrace,
 And chilling fogs—whose perspiration  feels
 Such frequent bars from  Eurus and the north—
 'T is not for those to cultivate a skin
 Too soft, or  teach the recremental fume
 Too fast to crowd through such precarious ways.
 For through the small arterial mouths,  that pierce
 In endless millions the close-woven skin,
 The baser fluids in  a constant stream
 Escape, and viewless melt into the  winds.
 While this eternal, this most copious waste
 Of blood, degenerate into vapid brine,
 Maintains its wonted measure, all the powers
 Of health befriend you, all the wheels of life
With ease and pleasure move.   But this restrained,
 Or more or less, so more  or less you feel 
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83
The functions labor.   From this fatal source
What woes descend is never to be sung.
To take their numbers were to count the sands
That ride in whirlwind the parched  Libyan air,
Or waves that, when the blustering north embroils
The Baltic, thunder on the German  shore.
Subject not then by soft emollient arts
This grand expense, on which your fates depend,
To every caprice of the  sky ;  nor  thwart
The genius of your clime : for from the blood
Least fickle rise the recremental steams,
And least obnoxious to the styptic air,
Which breathe  through, straiter  and more  callous
     pores.
The tempered Scythian hence, half-naked, treads
His boundless snows, nor rues the  inclement heaven;
And hence our painted  ancestors  defied
The east, nor cursed, like us, their fickle sky.

   The body, moulded by the clime, endures
The equator heats or hyperborean frost;
Except by habits foreign to its turn,
Unwise, you counteract its forming power.
Rude at the first, the winter shocks  you less
By long acquaintance.  Study then your sky, 
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THE  ART OF
Form to its manners your obsequious frame,
And learn to suffer what you cannot shun.
Against the rigors of a damp cold heaven
To fortify their bodies, some frequent
The gelid cistern ;  and where nought forbids,
I praise their dauntless heart.  A frame so steeled
Dreads not the cough, nor those ungenial blasts
That breathe the tertian or fell rheumatism.
The nerves  so tempered never quit their tone—
No chronic languors haunt such hardy breasts.
But all things have their bounds; and he who makes
By daily use the kindest regimen
Essential to his  health, should never mix
With human kind, nor art nor trade pursue.
He not the safe  vicissitudes of life
Without some shock endures ; ill fitted he
To want the known, or bear unusual things.*
Besides, the powerful remedies of pain,
(Since pain in spite of all our cares will come,)

  * This is evidently a mistake, if by " kindest" regimen is
meant the  mildest or simplest.  It is not true that a philo-
sophical attention  to our health unfits us to bear with  safety
the "vicissitudes of life." On the contrary, no man endures
so well and with so little shock to his  system, the thousand
nameless ills which it is so difficult to avoid in life, as he
who is, in all things, truly temperate. 
PRESERVING  HEALTH.
85
Should never with your prosperous days of health
Grow too familiar :  for by frequent use
The strongest medicines lose their healing power,
And even the surest poisons theirs to kill.

  Let those who from the frozen Arctos reach
Parched Mauritania, or the sultry west,
Or  the wide flood through rich Indostan rolled,
Plunge  thrice a day, and in the tepid wave
Untwist their stubborn pores ;  that full and free
The evaporation through the softened skin
May bear proportion to the swelling blood.
So  shall they 'scape the fever's rapid flames ;
So  feel  untainted the hot breath of hell.
With us, the man of no complaint demands
The warm ablution, just enough to clear
The sluices of the skin—enough to keep
The body sacred  from indecent soil.
Still, to be pure, even did it not conduce
(As much it does) to health, were greatly  worth
Your daily pains.   'T is this adorns the rich ;
The want of this is poverty's worst wo;
With this external  virtue age maintains
A decent grace ;  without it, youth and charms
Are loathsome.  This the venal Graces know; 
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THE ART OF
So doubtless do your wives :  for married sires,
As well as lovers, still pretend to taste ;
Nor is it less (all prudent wives can tell)
To lose a husband's than a lover's heart.

  But now the hours and seasons when to toil
From foreign themes recall my wandering-song.
Some labor fasting, or but slightly fed
To lull the grinding stomach's hungry rage.
Where nature feeds too corpulent a frame,
'T is wisely  done ; for while the thirsty veins,
Impatient of lean  penury, devour
The treasured oil, then is the happiest time
To shake the lazy balsam from its cells.
Now while the stomach from the full repast
Subsides, but ere returning hunger gnaws,
Ye leaner habits, give an hour to toil;
And ye whom no  luxuriancy of growth
Oppresses yet, or threatens to oppress.
But from the recent meal no labors please,
Of limbs or mind.  For now the cordial powers
Claim all the wandering spirits to a work
Of strong and subtle toil, and great event—
A work of time :  and you may rue the day
You hurried, with untimely exercise, 
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87
A half-concocted chyle into the blood.
The body overcharged with unctuous phlegm
Much toil demands :  the lean elastic, less.
While winter chills the blood and binds the veins,
No labors are too hard.*   By those you 'scape
The slow diseases of the torpid year,
Endless to name ; to one of which alone,
To that which tears the nerves, the toil of slaves
Is pleasure.   Oh ! from such inhuman pains
May all be free  who merit not the wheel.
But from  the burning lion when the sun
Pours down his sultry wrath—now while the blood
Too much already maddens in the veins,
And all the finer fluids through the skin
Explore their flight—me, near the cool cascade
Reclined, or sauntering in the lofty grove,
No needless slight occasion should engage
To pant and sweat beneath the fiery noon.t
Now the fresh morn alone and mellow eve
To shady walks and  active rural sports

  * Excessive labor is always an evil, in winter or in summer.
But constant and  moderate daily labor, and in the open air
if possible, is what is most conducive to health.
  t Much  depends on the character of our food and drink.
If these  are mild, we may toil in the sun much better than
if they are hot or  irritating. 
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THE ART  OF
Invite.   But while the chilling dews descend,
May nothing tempt you to the cold embrace
Of humid skies ;  though 't is no vulgar joy
To trace the horrors of the solemn wood
While the soft evening saddens into night;—
Though the sweet poet of the vernal groves
Melts all the night in strains of amorous wo.

  The shades descend, and midnight o'er the world
Expands her sable wings.  Great nature droops
Through all her works.   Now happy he whose toil
Has o'er his languid powerless limbs diffused
A pleasing lassitude.  He not in vain
Invokes the gentle deity of dreams.
His powers the most voluptuously dissolve
In soft repose.  On him the balmy dews
Of  sleep with double nutriment descend.
But would you sweetly waste the  blank of night
In deep oblivion, or on fancy's wings
Visit the paradise of happy dreams,
And waken cheerful as the lively  morn—
Oppress not nature sinking down to rest
With feasts too late, too solid, or too full;
But be the first concoction half-matured
Ere you to mighty indolence Tesign 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
89
Your passive faculties.  He from the toils
And troubles of the day to heavier toil
Retires, whom trembling from the tower that rocks
Amid the clouds, or Calpe's hideous height,
The busy demons  hurl, or in the main
O'erwhelra, or bury struggling under ground.
Not all a monarch's luxury the woes
Can counterpoise of that most wretched man,
Whose nights are  shaken with the frantic fits
Of wild Orestes ;  whose delirious brain,
Stung by the Furies, works with poisoned thought,
While  pale and monstrous painting shocks the soul,
 And mangled consciousness bemoans itself
Forever torn, and  chaos floating round.
What dreams presage, what dangers these or those
 Portend to sanity, though prudent seers
 Revealed of old, and men of deathless fame,
 We would not to  the superstitious mind
 Suggest new throbs, new vanities  of fear.
 'T is ours to teach you from the peaceful night
 To banish omens  and all restless woes.

    In study some protract the silent hours,
 Which others  consecrate to mirth  and  wine—
 And sleep till  noon, and hardly live till night.
 But surely this redeems not from  the shades 
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THE ART OF
One hour of life.*  Nor does it nought avail
What season you to drowsy Morpheus give
Of  the ever-varying circle of the day ;
Or whether, through the tedious winter gloom,
You tempt  the midnight or the morning damps.
The body, fresh and vigorous from repose,
Defies the early fogs ; but, by the toils
Of  wakeful day exhausted and unstrung,
Weakly resists the night's unwholesome breath.
The grand  discharge—the effusion of the  skin—
Slowly impaired, the languid maladies
Creep on, and through the sickening functions steal.
So, when the chilling east invades the spring,
The delicate Narcissus pines away
In hectic languor; and a slow disease
Taints all the family of flowers, condemned
To cruel heavens.  But why, already prone
To fade, should beauty cherish its own bane ?
0 shame !  0 pity !  nipt with pale quadrille
And midnight cares, the bloom of Albion dies !

   By toil subdued, the warrior and the hind
Sleep fast  and deep; their active  functions soon

  * This is a most  important doctrine ; happy is he who can
receive it.  So also the remarks which follow it. 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
91
With generous streams the subtle tubes supply,
And soon the tonic irritable nerves
Feel the fresh impulse and awake the soul.
The sons of indolence with long repose
Grow torpid, and with slowest Lethe drunk,
Feebly and lingeringly return to life,
Blunt every sense and powerless every limb.
Ye prone to sleep (whom sleeping most annoys)
On the hard mattrass or elastic couch
Extend  your limbs, and wean yourselves from sloth;
Nor grudge the lean projector, of dry brain
And springy nerves, the blandishments of down;
Nor envy while  the buried Bacchanal
Exhales his surfeit in prolixer dreams.

   He, without riot in the balmy feast
Of life, the wants of nature has supplied,
Who rises cool, serene, and full of soul.
But pliant nature more or less demands
As custom forms her, and all sudden change
She hates of habit, even from bad to good.
If faults in life or new emergencies
From habits urge you by long time confirmed,
Slow may the change  arrive, and stage by stage—
Slow as the shadow o'er the dial moves,
Slow as  the stealing progress of the year. 
92
THE ART  OF
  Observe the circling year : how unperceived
Her seasons change !  behold, by slow degrees,
Stern winter tamed into a ruder spring;
The ripened spring a milder summer glows ;
Departing summer sheds Pomona's store ;
And aged, autumn brews the winter storm.
Slow as they  come, these changes come not void
Of mortal shocks.  The cold and torrid reigns,
The two great periods of the important year,
Are in their first approaches seldom safe :
Funereal autumn all the sickly dread,
And the black Fates deform the lovely spring.
He well advised who taught our wiser sires
Early to borrow Muscovy's  warm spoils,
Ere the first frost has touched the  tender blade,
And late resign them, though the wanton spring
Should deck her charms with all her sister's rays;
For while the effluence of the skin maintains
Its native measure, the pleuritic spring
Glides harmless by, and autumn, sick to death
With  sallow quartans, no contagion breathes.

  I in prophetic numbers could unfold
The omens of the year, what seasons teem
With what diseases, what the humid south 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
93
Prepares, and what the demon of the east;
But you perhaps refuse the tedious song.
Besides, whatever plagues in heat or cold,
Or drought or moisture dwell,  they hurt not you,
Skilled to correct the vices of  the sky,
And taught already how to each extreme
To bend your life.  But should the public bane
Infect you, or some trespass of your own,
Or flaw of nature hint mortality,
Soon as a not unpleasing horror glides
Along the spine through all your torpid limbs,
When first the head throbs, or the stomach feels
 A sickly load, a weary pain the loins,
 Be Celsus called ; the Fates come rushing on ;
 The  rapid Fates admit of no delay.
 While wilful you, and fatally secure,
 Expect to-morrow's more auspicious sun,
 The  growing pest, whose infancy was w^eak
 And  easy vanquished, with triumphant sway
 O'erpowers your life.   For want of timely care
 Millions have died of medicable wounds.

   Ah ! in what perils is vain life engaged!
 What slight neglects, what trivial faults, destroy
 The hardiest frame !  Of indolence, of toil, 
94
THE ART OF
We die ; of want, of superfluity.
The all-surrounding heaven, the vital air,
Is big with death: and though the putrid south
Be shut, though no convulsive agony
Shake from the deep foundations of the world
The imprisoned plagues, a secret venom oft
Corrupts the air, the water, and the land.
What livid deaths has sad Byzantium seen !
How oft has Cairo with a mother's wo
Wept o'er her slaughtered sons and lonely streets !
Even Albion, girt with less malignant skies-
Albion the poison of the gods has drank,
And felt the sting of monsters all her own.

  Ere yet the fell Plantagenets had spent
Their ancient rage at Bosworth's purple field,
While for which tyrant England should receive
Her legions in incestuous murders mixed,
And daily horrors, till the Fates were drunk
With kindred blood  by kindred hands profused,
Another plague of more gigantic arm
Arose ; a monster never known before,
Reared from Cocytus its portentous head :
This rapid Fury not, like other pests,
Pursued a gradual course, but in a day 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
95
Rushed as a storm o'er half the astonished isle,
And strewed with sudden carcasses the land.

  First through the shoulders, or whatever part
Was seized the first, a fervid vapor sprung.
With rash combustion thence, the quivering spark
Shot to the heart, and kindled all within ;
And soon the  surface caught the spreading fires.
Through all the yielding pores the melted blood
Gushed out in smoky sweats; but nought assuaged
The torrid heat within, nor aught relieved
The stomach's anguish.   With incessant toil,
Desperate of ease, impatient of their pain,
They  tossed from side to side.   In vain the stream
Ran full and clear—they burnt and thirsted still.
The restless arteries with  rapid blood
 Beat strong and frequent.   Thick and pantingly
 The breath was fetched,  and  with  huge  laborings
     heaved.
 At last a heavy pain oppressed the head—
 A wild delirium came ; their weeping friends
 Were strangers now, and  this no home of theirs.
 Harassed with toil on toil, the sinking powers
 Lay prostrate and o'erthrown; a ponderous sleep
 Wrapt all the senses up.  They slept, and died. 
96
THE ART OF
  In some a gentle horror crept at first
O'er all the limbs ; the sluices of the skin
Withheld their moisture, till, by art provoked,
The sweats o'erflowed, but in a clammy tide.
Now free and copious, now restrained and slow ;
Of  tinctures various, as the temperature
Had mixed the blood; and rank with fetid steams,
As  if the pent-up humors by delay
Were grown more fell, more putrid and malign.
Here lay their hopes,  (though little hope remained,)
With full effusion of  perpetual sweats
To  drive the venom out.  And here the Fates
Were kind,  that long they lingered not in pain.
For who survived the sun's diurnal race,
Rose from the dreary gates of hell redeemed :
Some the sixth hour oppressed, and some the third.

  Of many thousands few untainted 'scaped ;
Of  those infected, fewer 'scaped alive;
Of  those who lived, some felt a second blow,
And whom the second spared, a third destroyed.
Frantic with fear, they sought by flight to shun
The fierce contagion.   O'er the mournful land
The infected city poured her hurrying swarms ;
Roused by the flames that fired her seats around, 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
97
The infected country rushed into the town.
Some sad at home, and in the desert some
Abjured the fatal commerce of mankind.
In vain : where'er they fled the Fates pursued,
Others, with hopes more specious, crossed the main,
To seek protection in far distant skies :
But none they found.  It seemed the general air,
From pole to pole, from Atlas to the east,
Was  then at enmity with English blood.
For but the race of England, all were safe
In foreign climes ; nor did this fury taste
The foreign blood which England then contained.
Where should they fly ?  The circumambient heaven
Involved them still, and every breeze was bane :
Where find relief?  The salutary art
Was mute; and, startled at the new disease,
In fearful whispers hopeless omens gave.
To Heaven with suppliant rites they sent their prayers.
Heaven heard them not.  Of  every hope deprived,
 Fatigued with vain resources, and subdued
 With woes resistless and enfeebling fear,
 Passive they sunk beneath the weighty blow.
 Nothing but lamentable sounds was heard,
 Nor  aught was seen but ghastly views of death.
 Infectious horror ran from face to face,
             7 
98               THE ART, ETC.
And pale despair.  'T was all the business then
To tend the sick, and in their turns to die.
In heaps they fell; and oft one  bed, they say,
The  sickening, dying and the dead contained.

  Ye guardian gods, on whom  the Fates depend
Of tottering Albion ! ye eternal fires,
That lead through heaven the wandering year ! ye
      powers
That o'er the encircling elements preside !
May nothing worse than what this age has seen
Arrive !  Enough abroad, enough at home,
Has  Albion bled.  Here a distempered heaven
Has  thinned her cities, from those lofty cliffs
That awe proud Gaul to Thule's wintry  reign;
While in the west beyond the Atlantic foam,
Her  bravest sons, keen for the fight, have died
The  death of cowards, and of common men—
Sunk void of wounds, and fallen without renown.

  But from these views the weeping muses turn,
And other themes invite my wandering song. 
BOOK   IV.
               THE  PASSIONS.

How much the mind affects the body.  Rules in regard  to study.
  Position of the body. The great art of life is to manage well
  the mind. Hypochondria—how cured.  Precepts and life of an
  " old  man."  Importance of cheerfulness.  Tendency of the
  selfish passions on health. Effects of love.  Its excesses.  Effects
  of anger. Salutary effects of music.

   The choice of aliment, the choice of air,
The use of toil and all external things,
Already sung—it now remains to trace
What good, what evil from ourselves proceeds,
And how the subtle principle within
Inspires with health, or mines with strange decay
The passive body.   Ye poetic shades,
That know the secrets of the world unseen,
Assist my song!  for in a doubtful theme
Engaged, I wander through mysterious ways. 
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THE ART OF
  There is, they say, (and I believe there is,)
A spark within us of the immortal fire,
That animates and moulds the grosser frame ;
And when the body sinks, escapes to heaven,
Its native seat, and mixes with the gods.
Meanwhile, this heavenly particle pervades
The mortal elements ; in every nerve
It thrills with pleasure or grows mad with pain,
And in its secret conclave, as it feels
The body's woes and joys,  this ruling power
Wields at its will the dull material world,
And is the body's health or malady.

  By its own toil the gross corporeal frame
Fatigues, extenuates or destroys itself.
Nor less the labors of the mind corrode
The solid fabric; for by subtle parts
And viewless atoms secret  nature moves
The mighty wheels of this stupendous world.
By subtle fluids poured through subtle tubes,
The natural, vital functions are performed.
 By these the stubborn aliments are tamed;
 The toiling heart distributes life and strength;
 These the still crumbling frame rebuild, and these
 Are lost in thinking, and dissolve in air. 
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101
  But 'tis not thought, (for still the soul's employed,)
*T is painful  thinking, that corrodes our clay.
All day the vacant eye without fatigue
Strays o'er the heaven and earth, but long intent
On microscopic arts,  its vigor fails.
Just so the mind with various thought amused,
Nor aches itself, nor gives the body pain.
But anxious  study, discontent and care,
Love without hope, and hate without revenge,
And fear and jealousy, fatigue the soul,
Engross the  subtle ministers of life,
And spoil the laboring functions of their share.
Hence the lean gloom that melancholy wears,
The lover's  paleness, and the sallow hue
Of envy, jealousy, the meagre stare
 Of  sore revenge ; the cankered body hence
 Betrays each fretful motion of the mind.

   The strong built pedant, who both night and day
 Feeds on the coarsest fare the schools bestow,
 And crudely fattens  at gross Burman's stall,
 O'erwhelmed with phlegm, lies in a dropsy drowned,
 Or sinks in  lethargy before his time.
 With useful studies  you, and arts that please,
 Employ your mind ; amuse, but not fatigue. 
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THE ART OF
Peace to each drowsy metaphysic sage!
And ever may all heavy systems rest!
Yet some there are, even of elastic parts,
Whom strong and obstinate ambition leads
Through all the rugged roads of barren lore,
And gives to relish what their generous taste
Would else refuse.   But may nor thirst of famfe
Nor love of  knowledge urge you to fatigue
With constant drudgery the liberal soul.
Toy with your books ;  and as the various fits
Of humor seize you, from philosophy
To fable shift, from serious Antonine
To Rabelais' ravings, and from prose to song.
While reading pleases, but no longer, read,
And read aloud resounding Homer's strain,
And wield the thunder of Demosthenes.
The chest so exercised improves its strength,
And quick vibrations through the bowels drive
The restless blood, which in unactive days
Would loiter else through unelastic tubes.
Deem it not trifling while I recommend
What posture  suits.  To stand and sit by turns,
As nature prompts, is best.  But o'er your leaves
To lean forever, cramps the vital parts,
And robs the fine machinery of its play. 
              PRESERVING  HEALTH.           103

  'T is the great art of life to manage well
The restless mind.  Forever on pursuit
Of knowledge bent, it starves the grosser powers :
Quite unemployed, against its own repose
It turns its fatal edge, and sharper pangs
Than what the body knows embitter life—
Chiefly where solitude, sad nurse of care,
To sickly musing gives the pensive mind.
There madness enters; and the dim-eyed fiend,
Sour melancholy, night and day provokes
Her own eternal wound.  The sun grows pale;
A mournful, visionary light o'erspreads
The cheerful face of nature;  earth becomes
A dreary desert, and heaven frowns above.
Then various  shapes of cursed illusion rise :
Whate'er the wretched fears, creating fear
Forms out of  nothing, and  with monsters teems
 Unknown in hell.  The  prostrate soul beneath
A load of huge imagination heaves,
And all the  horrors that the murderer feels
With anxious flutterings  wake the guiltless breast.
 Such phantoms pride in solitary scenes,
Or fear, on delicate self-love creates.
 From other cares absolved, the busy mind
 Finds in yourself a theme  to pore upon ; 
104
THE ART OF
It finds you miserable, or makes you so.
For while yourself you anxiously explore,
Timorous self-love, with sickening fancy's aid,
Presents  the danger that you dread the,most,
And ever galls you in your tender part.
Hence some for love, and some for jealousy,
For their religion some, and some for pride,
Have lost their reason ;  some for fear of want,
Want all their lives ; and others every day,
For fear of dying, suffer worse than death.
Ah! from your  bosoms banish, if you can,
Those fatal guests;  and first the demon Fear,
That trembles at impossible events,
Lest aged Atlas should resign his  load,
And heaven's eternal battlements rush down.
Is there an evil  worse than fear itself ?
And what avails it that indulgent Heaven
From mortal eyes has wrapt the woes to come,
If  we, ingenious to torment ourselves,
Grow pale at hideous fictions of our own ?
Enjoy the present;  nor with needless cares,  '
Of what may spring from blind misfortune's womb,
Appal the surest hour that life bestows.
Serene, and master of yourself, prepare
For what may come ; and leave the rest to heaven. 
PRESERVING  HEALTH.
105
  Oft from the body, by long ails mistuned,
These evils sprung, the most important health,
That of the mind, destroy : and when the mind
They first invade, the conscious body soon
In sympathetic languishment declines.
These chronic passions, while from real woes
They rise, and yet without the body's fault
Infest the soul, admit one only cure;
Diversion, hurry, and a restless life.
Vain  are the  consolations of the wise ;
In vain your  friends would reason down your pain.
O ye, whose  souls relentless love has tamed
To soft distress, or friends untimely slain !
Court not the luxury of tender thought;
Nor deem it  impious to forget those pains
That hurt the living, nought avail the dead.
Go, soft enthusiast! quit the cypress,groves,
Nor to  the rivulet's lonely moanings tune
Vour sad complaint.   Go,  seek the cheerful haunts
Of men, and mingle with the bustling crowd ;
Lay schemes for wealth, or power, or fame, the wish
 Of nobler minds, and push  them night and day.*
 Or join the caravan in quest of scenes

   * We may mingle in the " bustling crowd " without over-
 anxiety about  wealth, power or fame. 
106
THE ART OF
New to your eyes, and shifting every hour,
Beyond the Alps, beyond the Appennines.
Or more adventurous, rush into the field
Where war grows hot, and raging through the sky,
The lofty trumpet swells the maddening soul;
And in the hardy camp and toilsome march
Forget all softer and less manly cares.

  But most too passive, when the blood runs low,
Too weakly indolent to strive with pain,
And bravely, by resisting, conquer Fate,
Try Circe's arts; and in the tempting bowl
Of  poisoned nectar, sweet oblivion drink.
Struck by the powerful charm, the gloom dissolves
In empty air ;  elysium opens round. *
A pleasing phrenzy buoys the lightened soul,
And sanguine  hopes dispel your fleeting care;
And what was  difficult, and what was dire,
Yields to your prowess and superior stars :
The happiest you of all that e'er were mad,
Or  are, or shall be, could this  folly last.
But soon your heaven is gone ; a heavier gloom
Shuts o'er your head : and as the thundering stream,
Swollen o'er its banks with sudden mountain rain,
Sinks from its tumult to a silent brook— 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
107
So, when the frantic raptures in your breast
Subside, you languish into mortal man;
You sleep, and waking find yourself undone.
For prodigal of life, in one rash night
You lavished more than might support three days.
A heavy morning comes ; your cares return
With tenfold rage.  An anxious stomach well
May be endured ; so may the throbbing heart;
But such a dim delirium, such a dream
Involves you—such a dastardly despair
Unmans your soul, as maddening Pentheus felt,
When, baited round Cithseron's cruel sides,
He saw two suns, and double Thebes ascend.
You curse the sluggish port; you curse the wretch,
The felon, with unnatural mixture first
Who dared to violate  the virgin wine.
Or on the fugitive champaigne you pour
A thousand curses ; for to heaven it rapt
Your soul, to plunge you deeper in despair.

   Besides, it wounds you sore  to recollect
What follies in your loose ungarded hour
Escaped.   For one irrevocable word,
Perhaps that meant no harm, you lose a friend.
Or in the  rage of wine your hasty hand 
108
THE ART OF
Performs a deed to haunt you to your grave.
Add that your means, your health, your parts decay;
Your friends avoid you ; brutishly transformed,
They hardly know you ; or if one remains
To  wish you well, he wishes you in heaven.
Despised, unwept you fall—who might have left
A sacred, cherished, sadly  pleasing name ;
A name still to be uttered with a sigh.
Your last ungraceful scene has quite effaced
All sense and memory of your former worth.

  How to live happiest—how avoid the pains,
The disappointments and disgusts of those
Who would in pleasure all their hours employ—
The precepts  here of a divine old man
I could recite.  Though old, he still retained
His manly sense and energy of mind.
Virtuous and  wise he was, but not severe ;
He  still remembered that he once was young;
His easy presence checked no decent joy.
Him even the dissolute admired ; for he
A graceful  looseness when he pleased put on,
And laughing could instruct.  Much had he read,
Much more had seen ; he  studied from the life,
And in the original perused mankind. 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
109
  Versed in the woes and vanities of life,
He pitied man : and much he pitied those
Whom falsely smiling Fate has cursed with means
To dissipate their days in quest of joy.
" Our aim is happiness ;  't is yours, 't is mine,"
He said ;  " 't is the pursuit of all that live ;
Yet few attain it, if 't was e'er attained.
But they the widest wander from the mark,
Who through the flowery paths of sauntering joy
Seek this coy goddess; that from stage to stage
Invites us still, but shifts as we pursue.
For, not to name the pains that pleasure brings
To counterpoise itself, relentless Fate
Forbids that we through gay voluptuous wilds
 Should ever roam: and  were the Fates more kind,
 Our narrow luxuries would soon be stale.
 Were these exhaustless, nature would grow sick,
 And cloyed with pleasure, squeamishly complain
 That all was  vanity, and life a dream.
 Let nature  rest: be busy for yourself,
 And for your friend ; be busy even in vain,
 Rather than teaze  her sated appetites.
 Who never fasts, no banquets e'er enjoys;
 Who never toils or watches, never sleeps.
 Let nature rest: and when the taste of joy 
110
THE ART OF
Grows keen, indulge ; but shun satiety.
'Tis not for mortals always to be blest.
But him the least, the dull or painful hours
Of life oppress, whom sober sense conducts,
And virtue, through this labyrinth we tread.
Virtue and sense I mean not to disjoin ;
Virtue and sense are one ; and, trust me, still
A faithless heart betrays the head unsound.
Virtue (for mere good nature is a fool)
Is sense and spirit, with humanity.
'T is sometimes angry, and its frown confounds ;
'T is even vindictive, but in vengeance just.
Knaves fain would laugh at it; some great ones dare:
But at his heart the most undaunted son
Of fortune dreads its name  and awful charms.
To noblest uses this determines wealth;
This is the solid pomp of prosperous days;
The peace and shelter of  adversity.
And if you pant for glory, build your fame
On this foundation, which the secret shock
Defies of Envy and all-sapping Time.
The gaudy gloss of fortune only strikes
The vulgar eye: the suffrage of the wise,
The praise that's worth ambition, is attained
By sense alone, and dignity of mind. 
PRESERVING  HEALTH.
Ill
  " Virtue, the strength and beauty of the soul,
Is the best gift of heaven; a happiness
That even above the smiles arid frowns of fate
Exalts great nature's favorites:  a wealth
That ne'er encumbers, nor to baser hands
Can be transferred: it is the only good
Man justly boasts of, or can call his own.
Riches are oft by guilt and baseness earned;
Or  dealt by chance, to shield a lucky knave,
Or  throw a cruel sunshine on a fool.
But for one end, one much neglected use,
Are riches worth your care—(for nature's wants
Are few, and without opulence supplied.)
This noble end is, to produce the soul;
To  show the virtues in the fairest light;
To  make humanity the minister
Of  bounteous Providence; and teach the  breast
That generous  luxury the gods enjoy."

  Thus in  his graver vein the friendly sage
Sometimes declaimed. Of right and wrong he taught
Truths as refined as ever Athens heard;
And (strange to tell) he practised what he preached.
Skilled in the passions, how to check their sway
He knew, as  far as reason can control 
112
THE ART OF
The lawless powers.   But other cares are mine :
Formed in the school of Pason, I relate
What passions hurt the body, what improve;
Avoid them, or invite them, as you may.

  Know then, whatever cheerful and serene
Supports the mind, supports the body too.
Hence the most vital movement mortals feel
Is hope—the balm and life-blood of the  soul.
It pleases and it lasts.   Indulgent Heaven
Sent down the kind delusion, through the paths
Of  rugged life to lead us patient on.
Our greatest good,  and what we least can spare,
Is hope :  the last of all our evils, fear.

  But there are passions  grateful to the breast,
And yet no friends to life ; perhaps they please
Or  to  excess, and dissipate the soul;
Or  while they please, torment.  The stubborn clown,
The ill-tamed ruffian, and pale usurer,
(If love's omnipotence such hearts can mould,)
May safely mellow into love, and grow
Refined, humane, and generous, if they  can.
Love  in such bosoms never to a fault
Or  pains or pleases.  But, ye finer souls, 
              PRESERVING HEALTH.           113

Formed to soft luxury, and prompt to thrill
With all the tumults, all the joys and pains
That beauty gives, with caution and reserve
Indulge the sweet destroyer of repose,
Nor court too much the queen of charming cares;
For while the cherished poison in your breast
Ferments and maddens, sick with jealousy,
Absence, distrust, or even  with anxious joy,
The wholesome appetites and powers of  life
Dissolve in languor.  The coy stomach loathes
The genial board ; your cheerful days are gone;
The generous bloom that flushed your cheeks is fled.
To sighs devoted and to tender pains,
Pensive you sit, or solitary stray,
And waste your youth in  musing.   Musing first
Toyed into care your unsuspecting heart:
It found a liking there, a sportful fire,
And that fomented into serious love,
Which musing daily strengthens and improves
Through all the heights of fondness and romance :
And you 're undone, the fatal shaft has sped,
If once you doubt whether you love or no.
The body wastes away ; the infected mind,
Dissolved in  female tenderness, forgets
Each manly  virtue, and grows dead to fame.
            8 
114
THE ART  OF
Sweet heaven from such intoxicating charms
Defend all worthy breasts !  Not that I deem
Love always dangerous, always to be shunned ;
Love well repaid, and not too weakly sunk
In wanton and unmanly tenderness,
Adds bloom to health;  o'er every virtue sheds
A gay, humane, and amiable grace,
And brightens all the ornaments of man :
But fruitless, hopeless, disappointed,  racked
With jealousy, fatigued with hope and fear,
Too seribus, or too languishingly  fond,
Unnerves the body and unmans the soul.
And some have died for love; and some run mad ;
And some with desperate hand themselves have slain.

   Some to extinguish, others to prevent,
A mad devotion  to one dangerous fair,
Court all they meet.; in hopes  to dissipate
The cares of love among a hundred brides.
The event is doubtful: for there are who, find
A cure in this ; there are who  find it not.
'T is no relief, alas ! it rather galls
The wound, to those who are sincerely sick.
For while from feverish and tumultuous joys
The nerves grow languid and the soul subsides, 
PRESERVING HEALTH.
115
The tender fancy smarts with every sting,
And what was love before is madness now.
Is health your care, or luxury your aim,
Be  temperate still: when nature bids, obey ;
Her wild impatient sallies bear no curb:
But when the prurient habit of delight,
Or  loose imagination, spurs you on
To  deeds above your strength, impute it not
To  nature :  nature all compulsion hates.
Ah ! let not luxury nor vain renown
Urge you to feats you well might sleep without;
To  make what should be rapture  a fatigue—
A tedious task;  nor in the wanton arms
Of  twining  Lais melt your manhood down.
For from the colliquation of soft joys,
How changed you rise ! the ghost of what you was!
Languid, and melancholy, and gaunt, and wan ;
Your veins  exhausted, and your nerves unstrung.
 Spoiled of its balm and sprightly zest, the blood
 Grows vapid phlegm;  along the tender nerves
(To each slight impulse tremblingly awake)
 A  subtle fiend that mimics all the plagues,
 Rapid and restless, springs from part to part.
 The blooming honors  of your youth are  fallen;
 Your vigor pines ; your vital powers decay; 
116
THE ART OF
Diseases haunt you ;  and untimely age
Creeps on ; unsocial, impotent and lewd,
Infatuate, impious, epicure ! to waste
The stores of pleasure, cheerfulness and health!
Infatuate all who make delight their trade,
And coy perdition every hour pursue.

  Who pines with love, or in lascivious flames
Consumes, is with his own consent undone:
He chooses to be  wretched—to be mad;
And warned, proceeds, and wilful, to his fate.
But there's a passion, whose tempestuous sway
Tears up each virtue planted in  the breast,
And shakes to ruins proud philosophy.
For pale and trembling anger rushes in,
With faultering speech, and eyes that wildly stare;
Fierce as the tiger, madder than the seas,
Desperate, and armed with more than human strength.
How soon the calm, humane and polished man
Forgets compunction, and starts  up a fiend !
Who pines in love, or wastes with silent cares,
Envy, or ignominy, or tender grief,
Slowly  descends, and lingering,  to the shades.
But he whom anger stings, drops, if he  dies,
At  once, and rushes apoplectic down ; 
              PRESERVING HEALTH.           117

Or a fierce fever hurries him to hell.
For, as the body through unnumbered strings
Reverberates each vibration of the soul—
As is the passion, such is still the pain
The body feels ; or  chronic or acute.
And oft a sudden storm at once o'erpowers
The life, or gives your reason  to the  winds.
Such fates attend the rash alarm of fear,
And sudden grief, and rage, and sudden joy.

  There are, meantime, to whom the boisterous fit
Is health, and only  fills the sails of life.
For where the mind a torpid winter  leads,
Wrapt in a  body corpulent and cold,
And each clogged function lazily moves on,
A generous sally spurns the incumbent load,
Unlocks the breast, and gives  a cordial glow.
But if your wrathful blood is apt to  boil,
Or are your nerves too irritably  strung,
Wave all dispute ;  be cautious if you joke ;
 Keep lent forever ;  and forswear the bowl.
 For one rash moment sends you to the shades,
 Or shatters every hopeful scheme of life,
 And gives to horror all your days to come.
 Fate, armed with thunder, fire, and  every plague 
118
THE ART OF
That ruins, tortures, or distracts mankind,
And makes the happy wretched in an hour,
O'erwhelms you not with woes so horrible
As your own wrath, nor gives more sudden blows.
While choler works, good friend, you maybe wrong;
Distrust yourself, and sleep before you fight.
'T is not too late to-morrow to be brave ;
If honor bids, to-morrow kill or die.*
But calm advice against a raging fit
Avails too little ;  and it braves the  power
Of all that ever taught in prose or  song,
To tame the fiend that sleeps a gentle lamb,
And wakes a lion.  Unprovoked and calm,
You reason well, see as you ought  to see,
And wonder at the madness of mankind :
Seized with the common rage, you  soon forget
The speculation of your wiser hours.
Beset with furies of all deadly shapes,
Fierce and insidious, violent and slow,
With all that urge or lure us on to fate—
What refuge  shall we seek ? what arms prepare ?
Where reason proves too weak, or void of wiles
To cope with subtle or impetuous powers,

  * This, if we understand it, will hardly do.  We would
say, rather—Fight not at all, either to-night or to-morrow. 
PRESERVING  HEALTH.
119
I would invoke new passions to your aid :
With indignation would extinguish fear,
With fear or generous pity vanquish  rage,
And love with pride ;  and force to force oppose.

  There is a charm, a power that sways the breast,
Bids every passion revel or be still,
Inspires with rage, or all your cares dissolves ;
Can sooth distraction, and almost despair.
That power is music ; far beyond the stretch
Of those unmeaning warblers  on our stage,
Those clumsy heroes, those fat-headed gods,
Who move no passion justly but contempt,
Who, like our dancers,  (light,  indeed, and strong !)
Do wondrous feats, but  never heard of grace.
The fault is ours; we bear those monstrous arts—
Good heaven ! we praise them ; we with loudest peals
Applaud the fool that highest  lifts his heels,
And with insipid show of rapture die
 Of idiot notes impertinently long.
 But he the muse's laurel justly shares,
 A poet he, and touched with heaven's own fire,
 Who with bold rage or solemn pomp of sounds
 Inflames, exalts and ravishes the soul:
 Now tender, plaintive, sweet,  almost to pain, 
120
THE ART, ETC.
 In love dissolves you; now in sprightly strains
 Breathes a gay rapture through your thrilling breast,
 Or melts the heart with airs divinely sad,
 Or wakes to horror the tremendous strings.
 Such was the bard whose heavenly strains of old
 Appeased the fiend of melancholy Saul;
 Such was, if old and heathen fame say true,
 The man who bade the Theban domes ascend,
 And tamed the savage nations with his song;
 And such the Thracian, whose melodious lyre,
 Tuned to soft wo, made all the mountains weep,
 Soothed even the inexorable powers of hell,
 And half redeemed his lost Eurydice.
 Music exalts  each joy, allays each grief,
 Expels diseases,  softens every pain,
 Subdues  the rage of  poison and the plague;
And hence the wise of ancient days adored
One power of physic, melody and song.
 
       VALUABLE  WORKS
                PUBLISHED BY

GEORGE   W.   LIGHT,

        1  CORNHILL, BOSTON.
  The strong approbation  which  the following works
have met with  where they are known, has  induced the
Publisher to commence stereotyping them, and to  take
efficient  measures for their circulation in all parts of the
country.

           THE   YOUNG  WIFE,
                          OR
Duties  of Woman  in  the Marriage Relation.

                 Fifth Stereotype Edition.
     Embellished by a  beautiful Steel Plate and Vignette.
               BY DR. VVM. A. ALCOTT.
  This work is based on the principle, that the great business of
the wife is Education—the education of herself and her family.  It
therefore exhibits the duties of a wife, especially to her husband, in
a manner at once original and stiiking.  The author presupposes
her  to  have set out in  matrimony with christian  principles and
purposes;  and hence proceeds to inculcate what he deems the
best methods of  applying them in the routine of daily life and
conversation.  We believe that no one can rise from the perusal
of this  volume without a higher respect for female character, as
well as a higher confidence in the divine wisdom of matrimony.
  The following are a few of the subjects treated upon :
  Submission. Kindness.  Cheerfulness. Confidence. Sympathy.
Friendship.  Love.  Delicacy and Modesty.   Love of Home.
Self-Respect.  Purity of Character. Simplicity. Neatness. Order 
2          GEORGE  W.  LIGHT'S  PUBLICATIONS
and Method.  Punctuality.  Early  Rising.  Industr3'.  Domestic
Economy.  Domestic Reform.   Sobriety.  Discretion.  Scolding.
Forbearance.  Contentment. Habits and Manners. Dress. Health.
Attending the Sick.  Love of  Childhood.  Giving Advice.  Self-
Government.  Intellectual Improvement.   Social Improvement.
Moral and Religious Improvement.   Moral Influence on the Hus-
band.

   The following are selected from  the many favorable notices of

this work.
  "This is one of the best practical treatises of the day; correct and
thorough in its teachings—familiar and forcible  in its reasonings and illus-
trations, as well as excellent in its intent and object, on every point of
domestic economy and good deportment.  The  youug wife (and many old
ones too, as well as those who are neither) will find this volume an  able
counsellor and guide.  We rejoice to perceive  that the work has  reached
a second edition, almost before being known out of the city of Boston, and
trust that another edition will not supply the  demand of this city alone.
A hundred thousand copies would  not. suflicc for the whole country, if all
who need its instructions were prepared to receive them.  The require-
ments of economy, industry, temperance, healthfulness, purity, &.C., &c,
and all domestic virtues, are here most clearlv set forth and cogently en-
forced.  May they be as faithfully studied und heeded ! "—[New Yorker.]
  " It contains many excellent hints for the formation of the character of a
good and useful wife."—[Christian Register.]
  " We rind much to approve, little to cavil with, and nothing to condemn
in this  book.  It is one of a cla«s of hooks which should fill a shelf in
every lady's book-case."—[Ladies' Companion.]

  O" Copies in extra style for Presents.
  THE   YOUNG  HOUSE-KEEPER,
                             OR

       Thoughts  on  Food  and  Cookery.

                  Second Stereotype Edition.

                BY DR. VVM. A. ALCOTT.

  The grand object of this work is, to promote physical and moral
e ducalion. In this view it aims to render the maternal house-keeper
intelligent, rather than mechanical.  It treats of most of the various
kinds of food, both animal and vegetable, in common  use, and of
the most simple and rational modes of preparing  them.  And in
presenting what are claimed to be improved views.or modes of
cookery, it gives reasons why they are so.  It shows that a larg«
amount of time now devoted to the preparation of food and drink, 
ON health, domestic  duties, etc.       3
is worse than wasted, and that this time  ought to be and must ba
redeemed, and applied by the house-keeper herself to the physical,
moral  and  social improvement of her family.  It is believed thai
this Manual will save  at least one hundred dollars a year to every
large family, which may be devoted to other and nobler purposes
than mere eating and drinking.
   It includes the Dignity of House-keeping;  First Principles  of
the House-keeper;  Having a Plan ; Keeping Accounts ; Keeping
a Journal;  Nature, Character and Modes of preparing the princi-
pal kinds of food produced from Farinaceous vegetables, as wheat,
rye, Indian corn, peas, beans, rice, &c, on which subjects  there
are from twenty to  thirty chapters ; from  twenty to thirty chapters
on fruits, &c, and the modes of preparing or  using them as  food;
several chapters on milk, butter,  cheese, eggs,  flesh and fish; the
customs and fashions of cookery  as it has been and now is  ; esti-
mates on the  present waste in families; Cooking as it should be ;
how to begin  the work of reform  in cookery ;  a chapter of Recipes
for preparing food, especially vegetables and  fruit, on rational and
simple principles;  with several other important subjects.

   The following  are from the many favorable  notices of this work
which have already appeared :
  " We earnestly recommend it to the favor, not of the Young House-
keeper only, but of all who use as  well as prepare food.  It is a most
excellent work."—New Yorker.
  "The author of this  work maybe styled the Young Ladies' Friend.
No writer has labored mor? in their behalf than Dr.  Alcott.  It is replete
with sound practical sense—full of useful, nay, invaluable hints—just such
a book, in fact, as  every lady, whether rich or poor, should have  in ber
hands."—Portland  Transcript.
  " It will be  an excellent guide and help to the  housewife."—Boston
Mercantile Journal.
         THE   YOUNG   MOTHER,
                             OR
   The  Physical  Education of  Children.

            Tliird Edition—Embellished by a Vignette.

                BY DR. WM. A. ALCOTT.

  The " Young Mother " is designed as an every-day manual for
those who are desirous of conducting the physical education of tho
young—from the very first—on such  principles as Physiology and
Chemistry indicate.   It inculcates the great importance of pre- 
4         GEORGE W. LIGHT'S PUBLICATIONS
venting evil—especially physical evil—by implanting good habits.
We believe it to be the only work of a popular character, written
by a medical man, on this  subject, and that it is, on this account,
doubly valuable.  It is recommended by the Boston Medical and
Surgical Journal, and by the Press generally, as a work which
should be possessed by every family.
  The following is a brief synopsis of the Contents :
  The Nursery.  Temperature of the Nursery.  Ventilation of tho
Nursery.  The  Child's  Dress ;  Swathing  tne Body ; Form of the
Dress; Material of Dress;  Quantity  of Dress; Caps;  Hats and
Bonnets; Covering for the Feet; Pins; Remaining Wet; Remarks
on the Dress of Boys ; on the Dress of Girls.   Cleanliness.  Bath-
ing.   Food ; Nursing—how often ; Quantity of Food ; How  long
should Milk  be the only Food? On Feeding before Teething; From
Teething to Weaning;   During the Process of Weaning;  Food
subsequently to Weaning;  Remarks  on  Fruit; Confectionary;
Pastry;  Crude,  or  Raw Substances.   Drinks.   Giving Medicine.
Exercise—Rocking in the Cradle ; Carrying in the Arms; Crawl-
ing;  Walking;  Riding in  Carriages;  Riding  on  Horseback.
Amusements.   Crying.   Laughing.  Slees—Hour for Repose ;
Place for Repose ;  Purity of the Air ;  The Bed ; The Covering;
Night Dresses ; Posture  of the Body ;  State of the Mind ; Quality
of Sleep;   Quantity  of Sleep.  Early Rising.  Hardening  the
Constitution. Society.  Employments. Education of the Senses-
Hearing—Seeing—Tasting and Smelling—Feeling.  Abuses.

  The following editorial remarks will give some idea of the man-
ner in which it has been noticed in various parts of the country,
though many of the best periodicals  hare spoken of  it in still
stronger terms of approbation.  The Christian  Mirror observes—

  " The subject of this book is of vital interest to the whole human
family, and  is treated by Dr. Alcott with the most intelligible sim-
plicity.  We hope it  will find  its way into the  hands  of all  who
are entrusted with the training and rearing  of children ; and that its
sound views will supplant many of thoseliurlful maxims and prac-
tices which are lamentably prevalent, and that the existing genera-
tion of mankind will be  succeeded by a more  healthy and a more
moral race."
  The  Now York Y. M. Advocate says—" This neatly bound and well
printed book  should be in possession of all mothers, and especially the
youn».  It will undoubtedly meet  with a  rapid sale, and be extensively
useful."
  The  Providence Journal says—" It  is  such a book as we have long
wished to see the female part of the community favored with.  Dr. Alcott
has performed his task in a pleasing and judicious manner, and merits, as
we have no doubt lie will receive, the thanks of mothers, for the agreeable
and faithful guide he has provided for them."
O" Copies bound in extra style for Presents. 
ON HEALTH,  DOMESTIC  DUTIES,  ETC.       5
        THE   HOUSE   I   LIVE   IN,
                             OR

               THE  HUMAN  BODY.

    Second Edition—entirely re-written, enlarged and improved.

         FOR THE  USE OF FAMILIES AND  SCHOOLS.
                BY DR. WM. A. ALCOTT.
  The great difficulty of making a subject which has hitherto been
deemed dry and unintelligible, at once agreeable and interesting
to the young  mind, has led the author of this volume  to  describe
the human body as a House.
  The work treats, first, on the Frame—consisting of the bones,
muscles, tendons, &c.; secondly, of the Covering—consisting of
the skin, hair, nails, eyes, ears, &c.; and thirdly, of the  Apart-
ments and Furniture—by which are meant the interior cavities
and organs.   Nearly every  anatomical  and physiological term
which appears  in the work is so used or so explained, as  to be at
once  clearly understood and  apprehended.  The subject is illus-
trated by numerous engravings.
  The best recommendation of this work is, that it has been univer-
sally  approved of by the families and schools where it  has been
introduced, and by all medical men who have examined it.  It has
also received the  entire approbation of  the Press, and  is  selling
rapidly.
  The Christian Register says—" We have examined it with much plea-
sure.  It communicates highly  important  information in  Anatomy and
Physiology, in a very interesting manner. The Author, by his Library of
Health, &c, and now by this neat little volume, has done and is doing an
important work, in regard to one branch of popular education, which has
been hitherto too much neglected.  Society will reap good from his sow-
ing."
  The Philadelphia Commercial Gazette, in  speaking of it says—" It ia
full of instruction and entertainment.   It gives as plain and simple a
description of the human body as it is possible to write."
  This work has also received the high commendation  of Mrs. L. H.
Sioouhnev.
  83" By letters recently received from Europe, we learn that it is in the
course of re-publication in London, and that the teachers in the famous
institution of Count  Fellenberg, at Hofwyl,  in  Switzerland, make it ona
of the regular exercises of their pupils in French to translate it into that
language. 
6         GEORGE W. LIGHT'S PUBLICATIONS
         LIBRARY  OF   HEALTH,
                           AND
   Teacher  on  the Human  Constitution.

       Published Monthly—Price $1 a Year, in advance.
             DR. WM. A. ALCOTT, Editor.
  This is a Periodical work, originally  called the  "Moral Re-
former, and Teacher on the Human Constitution."  It is published
in numbers of 32 pages each, in neat book style for binding into a
volume, illustrated by engravings, and has now concluded the third
year of its  publication.  The numbers of the past years  are foi
sale, bound in neat  volumes.
  This work discusses, in a familiar manner, all subjects connected
with physical education and self-management.  It treats  on  the
connection of light, air, temperature, cleanliness, exer-
cise, SLEEP, FOOD,  DRINK,  CLIMATE,  the PASSIONS, AFFEC-
TIONS, &c, with HEALTH, HAPPINESS  and LONGEVITY. The
editor lakes the ground that a proper understanding of the  consti-
tutional laws of the  human body, and of all  its  organs and func-
tions, and a strict  obedience thereto, are  indispensable  to  the
highest perfection  and happiness—present and future—of every
living human being.  He  deems this knowledge more and more
indispensable in proportion to  the progress of civilization and
refinement.  The work is pledged to  support no system nor set of
principles, any farther than that system and those principles can be
proved to be  based on the laws of  Physiology, and  revealed
truth, and on human experience; and consequently its pages are
always open to fair and temperate discussion.
  The work has recently been warmly approved of by Georgb
Combe, (author of  the " Constitution of Man,")  as well as a large
number of distinguished men of this country, among whom are the
following:           •
  Dr. John C. Warren, Dr. S. B. Woodward, Rev. Dr. Humphrey,
Rev. S. R. Hall, Rev. Hubbard Winslow, Rev. R. Anderson, Rev.
Baron Stow, Rev.  B.  B. Wisner, R. H. Gillet, Esq., Rev. Wm.
Hague, Roberts Vaux, Esq., Dr. John M. Keagy, Dr. R. D. Mus-
sey, Prof. E. A. Andrews, Rev. L. F. Clark, Rev. M.  M. Carll,
Rev. Dr. Fay, Dr. Sylvester Graham. 
ON HEALTH, DOMESTIC  DUTIES, ETC.        7
                  A  TREATISE

                           ON


  BREAD   AND  BREAD-MAKING.


              BY SYLVESTER GRAHAM.

  This treatise, by the celebrated lecturer on the Science of Human

Life, recently published, has thus far met with a good sale, and will

doubtless have a wide circulation.  It meets with strong favor even

among those who do not agree with Mr. G. in his general principles

of diet, &c.  It treats on the following subjects :

  History of Bread ; Laws of Diet; Material of Rread ;  Proper-
tics  of Bread ; Fermentation ; Preparation of Bread ; Who should
make Bread ; Varieties of Bread.

  We insert here but one of the numerous favorable notices of this

work:
  The Boston Recorder remarks—" It  is a  treatise, as  we judge,  of
groat importance to  all who  eat bread, nnd to all who make bread, and
to all who love bread. Whatever objections may lie against some ol Mr.
Graham's theories, or against his 'measures,' this little woik deserves
the attention of all who regard healtli, comfort nnd life itself.  Facts are
stated which ought to be known ; nnd reasonings arc applied which can be
more easily rejected with supercilious scorn, than refuted on philosophical
principles."
                            A


    LECTURE  TO YOUNG  MEN,

INTENDED ALSO FOR THE  SERIOUS  CONSIDERATION  Of

          PARENTS  AND  GUARDIANS.

      Second Edition—Enlarged and Improved, with Notes.

              BY  SYLVESTER GRAHAM.

  The second edition of this  important work is nearly double  the
size of the first, although the price is increased but a trifle.  It is
selling rapidly.  It contains warm testimonials in its favor from
Wm. C. Woodbridge, Editor of the Annals of Education,  Dr. 
8        GEORGE W. LIGHT'S PUBLICATIONS.
Woodward, Superintendent of the Massachusetts Lunatic Asy-
lum, Dr. Alcott, and others.

  The following brief but highly valuable testimony is from the
distinguished superintendent of the Massachusetts Lunatic Hospital
at Worcester:
  "Dear Sir:—The subject of your Lecture to Young Men,
has been much neglected, although of great importance.
  This lecture,  while it sounds the alarm to the young, will not fail
to awaken the attention of parents, if once perused.  It is couched
in language as delicate as the nature of the subject will admit, and
may be read with propriety and benefit by all.
  The evil of which it treats, if I mistake  not, is more extensively
sapping  the foundation  of physical  rigor and moral purity, in the
rising generation, thau is generally apprehended, even by those who
are awake to the danger, and  who nave witnessed  the deplorable
influence of it upon its victims.
                    Yours, with respect,
                                 S.  B.  WOODWARD."


                 D3" Just out of Press.XI

THE  BOSTON  COMMON,  or Rural Walks in Cities.
  A very neat and interesting  little work, treating on the means of
  promoting health and comfort in cities and towns.  With an En-
  graving.
  G.  W. L.  publishes a number of valuable books in
addition to the  works here advertised, and keeps on
hand  a general  assortment  of School, Theological,
Religious, Moral, Physiological  and Miscellane-
ous Books, together with a good variety of Stationary,
for sale, wholesale and retail, at as low prices as those
of any other  house in  the  country.  Special effort is
made to keep a complete and constant supply of popular
works on  Health.  He also executes  Printing, of all
kinds, on the most reasonable terms. 
 

'&