T«is reprint of this Lecture contains parts of the oniitjfll by the 
j “ Virginia Medical a^feyHcul^rorliw. 
T H E 
Border-Land of Insanity-. 
With 
EXAMPLES FROM;THE ILLUSTRIOUS INSANE; 
BK1 N<» 
A POPULAR LECTURE, 
DELIVERED HY INVITATION. 
I!Y 
.EUGENE GUIS SOM, M. I)., 
SHUT. INSANE ASYLUM OK NORTH CAROLINA 
RAXEf&fh— 
JOHN NICHOLS, BOOK AND JOB l'UINTKB, 
1877. THE 
Border-Land of Insanity: 
WITH 
EXAMPLES FROM THE ILLUSTRIOUS INSANE; 
BEING 
A POPULAR LECTURE, 
DKI.IVKKKD BY INVITATION. 
BY >—^ 
EVGEEE GRISSOM, M. E., 
SUFT. INSANE ASYLUM OF NOKTH CAUOJ.INA 
RALEIGH: 
0O11.N NICItOtjS, BOOK AND JOB IOJINTEH, 
1877. LECTURE. 
Ladies and Gentlemen: 
There is :i mysterious land unlike any upon which the sun 
shines. Its realms are as vast as the bounds of space, its thrones 
grander than the kingdoms of earth, its palaces more resplen- 
dent than the dreams of Aladdin; its rivers flow with eternal 
music, its forests wave in more than tropical glory, its oceans 
roll in the primeval grandeur that engulfed the ancient conti- 
nents; its skies shine with auroras whose light and color the sun-* 
light may not hope to rival. 
Alas, there is close by a region of darkness profound, abysses 
of frightful depth, sounds and sights and fears of unimaginable 
woe, an unexplored home of spirit and demon and goblin dark, 
of spectres and all imaginable horrors. Here men walk all their 
days in leaden gloom, or sullen striving, or frantic rage against 
their fate. Beckoned on by a ghostly hand, they enter this, the 
terrific plain of melancholy, to march on to a final grave within 
its caverns. 
The former of these is the Kingdom of Genius, the latter is 
the Habitation of Madness. Between the two there lies a strip 
of unknown breadth, which Ave may term the Border-land of In- 
sanity. Here narroAV, there far away and peopled by adventu- 
rous spirits, avIio sometimes crossing in rapid flight, have turned 
with scorched Aving and terror stricken-steps, or may-hap in their 
devious Avay now to hope and again despair, have gone down at 
last in endless night, 
In this Border-land have dwelt great numbers of the marked 
men of their race—warriors, philosophers, kings, poets, prophets, 
artists, patriots and statesmen. The history of those of our fellows 
Avho have had glimpses into the greatest glories and the most 
frightful sorrows that may befall humanity, has for us a fascina- 
tion beyond the Avanderings of a Livingstone in equatorial Avilds, 
or a Kane amid the frozen secrets of the arctic North. 4 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
Ever since man recorded liis thoughts for brother man, the 
conception of the supernatural lias accompanied his mental life. 
Consciously or unconsciously, we are striving again and again 
to pierce the veil about us, and know the ultimate reasons of 
things, and recognize their invisible causes. From the familiar 
demon of Socrates, or the attendant spectre of Descartes, to the 
witches of our ancestors and the spirit-manifestations of to-day, 
the human mind has ever been reaching out to alliance with 
the supernatural. To plunge into the depths of profound ab- 
straction, to lose one’s self in the inmost recesses of reverie, 
is a perilous journey, from which only the most gigantic minds 
like Homer and Shakespeare, can safely return. 
Tf I present too sombre a picture to-night of the great, in their 
wanderings by Plutonian shores, I beg to say that the task you 
have flatteringly imposed upon me was accepted in tin1 hope 
that T might teach, however feebly, a lesson for the times. I 
come not, therefore, to amuse you with flowers of rhetoric, or 
sallies of wit, but to address myself to the graver task of read- 
ing with you, some lessons from the shadowy side of life, often 
concealed from sight, glossed over by the historic pen or only 
darkly hinted, but which openly read and courageously consid- 
ered, may not be without good to come. 
Philosophers have delighted in distinctions between what they 
call the faculties of the mind, for the want of a better term. 
Thus they name the power which receives and registers impres- 
sions from without, by means of the senses, Perception—the 
power which compares these, and reasons upon them, Intellect— 
the power which is capable of response to outer influence and 
circumstances, Emotion, and the power which in turn, sets in 
action the answer of the mind—the Will. 
But these are names after all, and a mere approach in expres- 
sion to such and such a capability of the mysterious being within 
us, the one and really indivisible essence which we call the im- 
mortal mind. 
For the younger part of my audience I must repeat some facts 
so well known, as now to be simple truisms—but these statements 
are indispensable in their relations to the conclusions, to which I 
would invite your attention. 
The instrument with which the immortal part within us reaches TiiE Bokdek-Land of Insanity. 
5 
tlie material world, is the human brain. Thousands of facts tell 
us that from that centre, through what are called the nerves of 
special sense, and also from that prolongation of its substance 
which constitutes the spinal cord, by numberless minute branches 
of nerves to the remotest parts of the body, go the telegraphic 
wires which bear the mandates of the mind. 
There has arisen at this day a school of philosophers who aver 
that the mind is the mere secretion of the brain, a force and 
nothing more, expended in the act, created anew for each opera- 
tion, and necessarily dying with the body that gives it exis- 
tence, in the dreary death of annihilation. This specious phi- 
losophy, this glittering solution of the complicated phenomena 
of the mental world, making men the automata of physical 
force, when pressed to its logical end, knows no conscience, no 
right or wrong, no Divine law, and indeed, no God in all the 
universe; only the likes and dislikes of atoms, and the blind 
whirlwinds of physical attraction. 
This dream—for it is only a dream—is spread over the length 
and breadth of the land, in our papers and magazines, in contem- 
porary addresses and poems, and is supposed to be entertained 
by many gentlemen of eminence in the medical world. 
It has perhaps become necessary for the protection of the 
young, to show that the faith of our fathers is founded on the 
rock of truth, and impregnable. 
The mind that dwells within us is a spark of Divine essence, 
destined to a life beyond the grave. Did I say that the nerves 
were the telegraphic wires of the system arid the brain the cen- 
tral battery ? True, but the operator is the mind, separate and 
independent from the machinery at its command, and the bat- 
tery while sending forth currents of influence to the farthest 
wires, when the connection is unbroken, gives but the jangle of 
unintelligent motion until the directing power of the operator 
impresses thought upon its quiverings, or direction upon its 
force, and registers his will in intelligible language. 
But if the wires are suddenly broken, or slowly rusted away, or 
in the lapse of time the currents of the battery grow feebler and 
•lie away finally for want of the feeding acids and metals, the 
play of whose mutual action is transmuted to electric force; 
or if the lightnings of Heaven seize and for a while range these 6 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
wires with uncontrollable power, in any and all these cases, the 
operator stands powerless to express his will, but he is neverthe- 
less still existent and if the damage he not irreparable, he is 
ready to.resume control, in so far as the delicate apparatus is 
re-adjusted and re-connected, and supplied again with the pure 
and efficient pabulum of its operations. 
The proposition I assert, is that there is no such thing as a dis- 
eased mind, where the body is in perfect health, implying the 
brain natural in size, unaffected in its structure or functions 
by disease, and supplied with pure blood, unvaried by excess or 
diminution. The mens saner alwayes resides in corpora sano. 
Let any one of these conditions be destroyed by imperfect 
organization of the brain at birth, or its abnormal development 
by mechanical injury to its vessels, whether by violence or 
disease, or by poisoned blood circulating through its structure, 
and there comes a period when thick clouds envelope the spirit 
and obscure mental appreciation, or even directly interrupt its 
every day intercourse with men and things, and by degrees and 
insensible shades the man drifts into the catalogue of the in- 
sane. 
We cannot too distinctly realize that insanity is purely a phys- 
ical disease, and as such calls for sympathy and care, and restor- 
ation if possible. The time was when insanity was regarded as 
the personation of demons. As in the dark ages, the hospitals 
were attached to the monastic establishments, it was not unnat- 
ural in one point of view, that the discipline enforced among 
the monks for evil words and deeds, should be applied to the 
wretched patients committed to their hands. 
Therefore, we observe that among the Franciscans, who en- 
forced severe self-chastenings, each miserable lunatic received ten 
lashes per day to drive out the evil spirit. Stripes, chairs of 
restraint, tortures equal to the direst imaginations of the Inquisi- 
tion, bleedings with the lancet, whirling chairs, whose gyrations 
reached a hundred revolutions a minute; iron cages suspended 
by chains over tanks of water so that the victims might be 
submerged to the neck—this frightful picture, which I will not 
further pursue, presents the system of treatment for these un- 
fortunates lasting even to 1790, over a great part of the civil- 
ized world, within the lifetime of many living men. Tiie Border-Land of Insanity. 
7 
But by the efforts of the wise and good, men have learned to 
know that this mysterious possession that for centuries blasted 
its victims and set them apart from their fellows as the objects 
of Divine wrath, or the playthings of devils and demons, was 
but a disease—one of the ills that flesh is heir to. Like other 
afflictions, sometimes insidious in approach, sometimes bursting 
on the sufferer with terrific suddenness, it is nevertheless, like 
them, a condition to be accounted for upon a physical basis, pre- 
ventable wi'hin certain bounds and its cure, blessed be Provi- 
dence, also possible, and even probable with favoring circum- 
stances. 
Can the mind suffer disease? Then it is pierced with mortal 
taint and will surely die, beyond hope of resurrection. Thou- 
sands of men come back to life and happiness, after even what 
some would call the death of mind. Why are they not new 
men, if the soul is a secretion of the brain ? IIow is it possible 
that each man comes back to his own identity ? Who has ever 
found himself or recognized another as a new being, gifted with 
a separate and independent mind after the passage through a 
season of lunacy, even of years. Voice, expression, language, 
views, tastes, education, whatever individualizes or differentiates 
one man from another, comes back to stamp him as such a crea- 
ture of God his Maker, and no other one. 
What constitutes insanity and how the change occurs, I will 
not attempt to discuss within the brief scope of this lecture. 
Hardly any two agree to-day upon precise distinctions in the 
former case and the latter is yet an unrevealed book. 
But we do know its indications and accompaniments. LTnder 
ordinary circumstances, it is not the work of one generation. 
By this, it is not meant that the parent must necessarily present 
the phenomena that we recognize in this disease, but that he 
prepares the way for its development. And this he may do in 
a great many ways, but chiefly by abnormal and unnatural modes 
of life. 
He may gorge the brain with stimulating drink for years; he 
may narcotize it with tobacco, or excite it by the fever of gam- 
bling at the card table or in the chances of speculative business; 
lie may neglect the dictates of reasonable hygiene, and give his 
life to mental exertion, keeeping the brain filled with blood to 8 
The Bokdek-Lanu of Insanity. 
its utmost endurance, in the intent study of an idea, forgetful of 
the needs of physical exercise; he may abandon himself to sen- 
sual excess, or neglect the demands of sleep, or pursue the re- 
wards of political ambition, or the vanities of social extrava- 
gance, until he has no life to transmit his offspring, but that 
which carries with it impaired force and defective structure. 
It is a startling fact that this is the sin of the age—excess in 
one or many of these forms in this era of rushing social currents 
and conflicting destinies, and day by day retribution strikes her 
knell. One man is paralyzed; another on the couch of a babe with 
profound nervous prostration; another is epileptic; another falls 
under the lightning stroke of appoplexy, like Dickens, or die 
like Horace Greeley, the victim of insanity, while others again 
slowly drag out an intellectual night like that of the poet 
Charles Fenno Hoffman, for so many years past an inmate of an 
asylum, or in these words, (written by a maniac himself,) dwell 
in a land where, as he beautifully says: 
“There is a winter in my soul, 
The winter of despair; 
Oh, when shall spring its rage control ? 
When shall the snowdrop blossom there? 
Cold gleams of comfort sometimes dart 
A dawn of glory on my heart, 
But quickly pass away. 
Thus Northern lights the gloom adorn, 
And give the promise of a morn 
That never turns to-clay.” 
Insanity would appear to require both predisposing and exci- 
ting causes, where it is not the direct result of overwhelming 
violence to the brain. The great predisposing cause is left a 
heritage somewhere in the ancestry" of the child. Thousands ol 
years do not obliterate the Jewish nose, the Mongolian eye re- 
mains, the fair skin of the Northmen transplanted eight centu- 
ries ago, in secluded valleys in Italy, is yet preserved; nay, such 
a trifle as the Bourbon mouth, is retained for centuries. W ho 
does not see the stamp of parentage in expression, in the very 
shape of a nail or tone of a voice? Who can doubt there is at 
least a similar tendency to transmit the acquired conditions of 
the brain and nervous system, and the more so, as this of the 
whole frame is the most impressible portion. Tiie Border-Land of Insanity. 
9 
Just what changes in the structure of the brain invites the 
access of insanity, it may be impossible to tell. Sometimes 
there are enormous abscesses within its substance, or areas of 
hardened or softened convolutions; again it is studded with minute 
points of tuberculous or dead material, again there is but the faint- 
est blush of inflammation; not unoften it defies the naked eye, 
and only after it has been artificially hardened, and a thin paper- 
like slice rendered transparent and colored with carmine, and 
exposed to long examination in the microscope, as some distin- 
guished anatomists are doing to-day, does the minute degener- 
ation of its tissue, or enlargement and false arrangement of its 
circulating vessels betray itself. 
Yet the difficulties here, as brave and industrious as patholo- 
gists are, in the struggle to surmount the obstacles, are by no 
means greater than those which confront us on the threshold of 
inquiry in many diseases, and indeed in the final recesses of 
every physiological operation. What we call disease is after 
all but a collection of manifestations we term symptoms, hardly 
absolutely alike in any two cases; 
If I must ask pardon for requesting you to follow me through 
the devious ways of philosophers in explaining the road to the 
goal I would reach, it is that I am ignorant of other modes of 
approaching it, and must ask you to tread this dry and dusty 
pilgrimage with me. 
We have spoken of faculties, for convenience sake, entitled Pre- 
ception, Intellect, Emotion and Will. Let us briefly trace the 
successive involvement of these, in the production of insanity. 
Through preception, the mind takes knowledge of the objects 
around, and with the aid of memory, marshals them in their 
absence into a conception. 
Unreal preception is illusion, the first step away from just ob- 
servation and conclusion. This is as common as the affairs of 
every day life. Any disordered sense may give rise to it—to a 
jaundiced tongue, all things are bitter; in certain affections of 
of the ear, bells are ever sounding or waves roaring. We pass 
along a road at night, and are suddenly startled by a white mile- 
stone, which assumes the shape of the white-robed ghost of our 
childhood. Reason soon assures us that this is a momentary 
dazzle and disturbance of the sense of vision from its true work. 10 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
But in some lives illusions by thousands chequer and disturb 
the whole course of existence. Let us go patiently on to 
observe. 
A conception of an absent object is the revived impression 
which has been preserved in whole or part by memory. So a 
hallucination is an illusion that reason does not dispel, but which 
hangs about the mind seeking admittance into the domains of 
admitted truth. If we do not dismiss the momentary sight of 
the ghostly milestone as the glare of disturbed sense, but fly 
before it, and every moment turn to see it pursue, we are the 
victims of hallucination. 
That which more distinctly illustrates hallucination as disor- 
dered conception, is the striking fact that men whose eyes are 
out may have hallucinations of dread visions before them, and 
so of the other senses. 
Perhaps the hairs, breadth between the excitement of the sane 
mind and the beginning of the insane condition lies somewhere 
here—the one may still compare his hallucinations with past 
knowledge and refuse to accept their dominion over him, the 
other may submit without question and be lost. 
Yet the question may be and has been asked—can the mind 
be both sane and insane at once—can these abnormal hallucina- 
tions be ever the legitimate children of a mind perfectly normal ? 
The next downward step is to absolute delusion—if pursued 
by the spectral hallucination which we have described, we some 
day in uncontrollable weariness and despair turn and strike down 
the monster by our side, and so unwillingly destroy a wife or a 
child at our feet, fixed delusion has done its work, and henceforth 
Ave are numbered among the hosts of maniacs. Who shall say 
where the subtle line Avas crossed—Avho shall say Avliat under 
current of life drifted us into that malstrom ? 
The lamented Greisinger affirms ideas which briefly stated 
show that those Avhose fate it is to be stricken with a hereditary 
disposition to this disease turn imperceptibly to crooked paths 
which only lead downwards; their cerebral actions are different 
from those of a majority of mankind. The impressions of the 
outer world impinge upon an abnormally excited centre; uncom- 
mon conditions arise, unnatural dispositions are excited; bye and 
bye active irritation sets in, a tendency to weariness follows; im- The Border-Land of Insanity. 
11 
aginations which are for the moment the passing whims of heal- 
thy brains are cherished and mantained, bye and bye the dark 
and bitter side of life is all they see; the brain disease becomes 
fixed, its results are reflected in diminished and preverted nerve 
power throughout the system, and so by impoverished blood 
back again to the fountain head in circling rounds down to 
helpless dementia. 
It is not the least extraordinary fact in this curious subject 
that what are called the primordial delusions of insanity are so 
well defined and constantly repeated. Great persecution, 
mighty elevation, everlasting condemnation, superhuman 
strength and wisdom, access to Divinity, these appear again and 
again in typical forms of disease. The famous man from whom 
I have quoted ascribes such recurring delusions not to emotional 
foundations as their source of production, but rather attributes 
their direct origin to cerebral disturbances. He beautifully 
illustrates, by comparing this with the contrast of the walk of 
of the man in health, and that of him whose nerve force in the 
spinal cord has been impaired by disease. 
“ As the ganglion-cells of the spinal cord work together in 
the most exquisite manner, receiving exact sensitive impressions 
of the floor as touched by the foot in a regular motor manner, 
making complete harmony, so by such disease as shows anom- 
alous action of the cells, there is produced, whatever may be the 
effort of the will, such a walk as exhibits the fatal mark of want 
of harmony.” This occurs in some of the most intractable 
cases that affect the frame of man. 
By complete analogy, “ the processes giving rise to imagina- 
tions, take place in the ganglion-cells of the outer surface of the 
brain; in the normal state, these actions, though numberless, 
work together in beautiful regularity—but by the anomalous 
action of the cells of the cortical substance of the brain, words 
and imaginations appear without a real existence. 
We shall find that the great of this earth have often been the 
unhappy subjects of the most cruel hallucinations, and even the 
victims of confirmed delusions, ending not unoften in outbreak- 
ing mania or lingering melancholia. 
We shall find to the confounding of those who would ignore 
the nobler part of man and reduce mind to the level of a mate- 12 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
rial secretion, that sages, philosophers and poets have given their 
grandest productions to the world between the attacks of dis- 
ease, and during the interval, as it were, when the veil was 
withdrawn and the bars broken down that resisted the control 
of the immortal part over the poor frail shell, that subserves its 
uses in the fleeting present of this life. 
I would not rashly say that all the great names to which I 
shall presently advert must be placed upon the rolls of the un- 
doubtedly insane, but I will aver that there is not one whose 
life does not show at some time the evidence of perverted or im- 
paired cerebral force—and in proportion as we discover a tainted 
parentage, a badly trained childhood, an intense mental strain, 
or extraordinary physical excess or disturbance, just so may we 
trace their wanderings into the mysterious Border-land that I 
have described to-night—the realm where genius and madness 
rule with divided sway. 
In the language of Erskine, “To constitute insanity it is not 
necessary that Reason should be hunted from her seat; it is 
enough that Distraction sits down beside her, holds her trem- 
bling in her place, and frightens her from her propriety.” 
It is Lord Brougham who declares that “the inability to strug- 
gle against a delusion constitutes unsoundness of mind.” 
And in regard to partial insanity, he affirms that the disease 
is always present, and only not apparent by the accident that the 
proper chord is not struck at the time. It has often been pro- 
posed as a test, that it is indicative of the affection that there be 
a delusion, if but rarely manifested, and a state of mind incapa- 
ble of mastering it. 
Hallucinations take possession when the reason, having a cloud 
before it, cannot correct the misapprehension of the lower senses. 
“It is a state of ideal intellection,” says the celebrated Prof. 
Ordronaux, “in which the reason, after long struggling to main- 
tain its ascendency over the judgment, lias finally yielded, but 
after yielding can still apprehend and compare correctly the 
relation of things. Thus even the insane rarely have hallucina- 
tions of more than two senses.” 
It is a pregnant fact in this connection, that the original basis 
of hallucination often is prolonged reverie. Perhaps it is of little 
consequence whether the cerebral fullness that gives rise to dis- The Bokdek-Lakd of Iksanity. 
13 
ordered brain action be the result of congested brain without 
voluntary effort, or the sequel of long continued voluntary and 
strained attention, especially if the blood vessels by inheritance, 
have been weakened to the point of yielding. The melancholy 
result is the same. 
Long ago Aristotle said: 
“Nullum mangnum ingenium sine mixtura dementia,” and 
this has been a prolific text. Some writer, indeed, has ventured 
the observation that “All who have been famous for their ge- 
nius, whether in the study of philosophy, in affairs of state, in 
poetical composition, or in the exercise of the arts, have been 
inclined to insanity or epilepsy, or one or the other of these dis- 
eases has existed in the same family.” 
I will ask you now to consider with me some of the innumer- 
able men of power or of genius who have signally exhibited the 
fate of humanity when hallucination or delusion leads it away 
into the Border-land of Unreason. 
Charles IX of France, the impotent boy whose name ruled 
France, under the sway of his mother, goes to the Castle of Blois 
to welcome the Protestant chieftains after long and useless 
civil strifes. He agrees to the marriage between his sister Mar- 
guerite and Henry of Navarre his cousin, and cries; “I give my 
sister in marriage not only to the Prince of Navarre, but as it 
were,to the whole Protestant Party.” 
The scheme effected, and the Protestants safely ensnared in 
the city of Paris, upon the occasion of the wedding solemnities, 
the wretched boy gives the signal to the alarm bell that tolls 
two o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 24th August, 1572. 
Old men, terrified maidens, helpless infants, venerable mat- 
rons, all are stricken down in their blood. Trembling at the 
very sound of the deep echo to the alarm, he cries to stop, but 
too late. Beacon fires have lit their baneful glares, and alarm 
bells are sending the signal to the remotest corners' of France. 
Recovering from his terror, fury seizes him—his eyes glare with 
frenzy, he shouts to the assassins, and grasping a gun, he joins 
the work of death, shooting from the window of the palace, the 
wounded and the flying. Torches are held on high, that his 
own body-guard may slaughter in the very court yard of the 
palace, the fugitives who stream to the King for protection. 14 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
“ Let not one Protestant be spared to -reproach me !” was his 
mad shout. What pen can ever picture the terrors of the mas- 
sacre of St. Bartholomew which spilled the blood of a hun- 
d red thousand Frenchmen! 
The world was struck with horror. Geneva, to this day com- 
memorates it with fasting and prayer. Elizabeth hung her 
court in mourning. The pulpits of Scotland rang with the tale* 
John Knox declared, 
“ Sentence has gone forth against the murderer, the King of 
France, and the vengeance of God will never be withdrawn from 
his house.” 
And the day of retribution did speedily come. The echo of 
the world’s indignation was in the heart of Charles. He, who 
had, with sublime hypocrisy, told Admiral Coligny, when suffer- 
ing from an assassin’s woui’id: “Father, you received the 
wounds, but I the sorrow;” and yet who had seen that venera- 
ble body dragged through the streets three nights after and 
hacked to pieces in his very presence, was overcome now, 
not by the fear of man but with a frightful indescribable nerv- 
ous horror. Everywhere around him he saw the spectres of the 
gory slain, showing their gaping wounds and attended by threat- 
eding demons. He became morose, gloomy and finally com- 
pletely silent. He left all society and month after month the 
scorpion fangs of remorse gnawed his heart. 
• Finally, his very bed clothes were crimsoned with a sweat of 
mortal agony. His aspect of profound misery drove off all hu- 
man companionship. He groaned and wept and forever cried, 
“Oh what blood!” lie is deserted by all but his nurse, and he 
calls out w ith despairing eyes, “ What blood have I shed,” and 
dies—cut off at twenty four. The very courtiers turn away 
from a corpse so accursed, and but three gentlemen in all 
France are found to accompany the body to its tomb in the 
vaults of St. Denis. 
The history of royalty is full of proof that the brain where- 
on the crown rests is often no more fit for royal cares, than 
that which plaited straw surrounds in yonder poor maniac’s 
dream. 
Thus, read a page or two of the life of Frederick the Second 
of Prussia, the father of Frederick the Great. The Border-Land of Insanity. 
15 
For a dozen years before his death, and after long and repeat- 
ed seasons of the extremests debauch, the King’s health gave 
way; what the world recognizes as hypochondria, set in—a 
state of profound despondency and bodily suffering. He became 
as austere in religious observance as before he had been wild in 
excess. All conversation in the royal family was forbidden, 
except upon religious topics; he compelled all its members daily 
to read sermons and sing hymns. He obliged the prince and 
his sister to eat most nauseous dishes—would even spit in 
their food—he addressed them always in severe language, and 
struck at them with his crutch. His disease was plainly exhibited 
when he tried to strangle himself, but his life was saved by the 
Queen. 
Having beaten Prince Frederick more than once to the point 
of exhaustion, he seized him finally by the hair and threw him 
to the ground, (for his physical strength was great) beat him 
as long as it gave him satisfaction, when he dragged him to the 
window in maniacal fury to throw him headlong, but was happi- 
ly prevented by those who came to the rescue. 
Failing in the effort to secure a renunciation from the Prince 
of his right of succession, he allowed him to attempt to escape, 
in order that he might obtain sentence of death upon him, by a 
court martial, and that he tried to anticipate by running him 
through the body with his own sword. 
Failing in the sentence of death, he condemns both the Prince 
and his sister, his child and tender daughter, to the cold cell of 
a prison, and begins a course to convert them to Christianity. 
\\ riting a letter to the prisoners’ chaplain, he betrays the long 
cherished delusion that had mastered his brain. He knew, he 
said, that his son had a heart of iron, and was a puppet in the 
in the fangs of Satan. All this was to drive out the demon and 
convert his unhappy boy to a reasonable being. The Prince 
was confined in a miserable room, and on the very edge of star- 
vation for a great length of time. The King never recov- 
ered his reason, yet such was the ignorance of that day, and the 
sacredness of power, that he grasped the crown to the very last. 
It may even be doubted if the child of so much persecution, 
the great Frederick, did not himself exhibit the deep mark of 
his father’s malady, in a thousand minute details which we will 
not stop to reckon here. 16 
The Border-Land of Insanity 
Indeed, so far from peace and health and strength as the her- 
itage of the imperial purple, the dazzling seat of power lias 
always held some uneasy, toppling wretch, whose sceptre was 
half unreal in his nerveless grasp. Philip of Macedon was 
once insane—King Sanl is clearly pictured so—Mahomet was an 
epileptic, given to magnificent visions—Caesar another epileptic, 
and as Cassius says, like a sick girl when the fit was upon him. 
Napoleon believed in his star as ruling his destiny—he is re- 
ported also to have suffered from epilepsy, twin-sister of mad- 
ness—he is known to have lost a great battle when in much bod- 
ily suffering and confusion of ideas from a fit of indigestion; he 
was not unoften surprised in profound solitude watching some 
airy figure of his brain, and holding his hand to the retreating 
shade. 
On the other hand his antagonist, Castlereagh, the architect 
of the Union of Ireland with England with one legislative body, 
whom Parliament thanked for his labors in the settlement of 
Europe, after the fall of Napoleon, became shattered in mind 
from the great labors of the session of 1822, and when known 
to be in a fit of insanity, his physicians allowed him to go to his 
seat in Kent, where he soon took his own life. 
Peter the Great, whose exploits have been the wonder of our 
childhood, and whose powers of administration, and superb exec- 
utive energy challenge the admiration of all men, paid alike 
the inevitable penalty of a vicious ancestry and a disordered life, 
lie gave himself up to the control of evil passions and the most 
debased sensual excesses—history abounds with the strange freaks 
that will occur to every reader. lie sees his son Alexis con- 
demned to death; at another period, he remains three days and 
nights fasting, upon the death of Peter, his favorite son, and 
his own life was despaired of. Again for maladministration, he 
flogs with the dubina, (his cane of Spanish reed), the person of 
the celebrated Menzikoff, prime minister of the realm. Fi- 
nally the paroxysms of an obscure disease which physicians recog- 
nize as exceedingly painful, ushered in outbreaks of wild mania, 
and he went to the grave. 
Victor Amadeus I, of Sardinia, was a victim of that affection 
which has been termed kleptomania. King as he was, he could 
not resist an overpowering inclination to steal, to commit the 
most petty thefts of valueless trifles. The Border-Land of Insanitt. 
17 
Queen Francisca, of Portugal, is another monarch whose in- 
sanity was so complete as to remove her from the throne, in the 
early part of this century. 
But probably no page of royal calamity possesses the interest 
to the American people, which hangs about that which recounts 
the misfortunes of George III. 
This monarch, it has been said by distinguished authority, 
was one who might least have been expected to fall into in- 
sanity, by hereditary predisposition, or bodily constitution. But 
will not a full examination of his history rather indicate the 
contrary opinion ? 
The father of the Hanoverian line, Duke William of Lunen- 
burg, called William the Pious, was deprived by fate of sight 
and reason. “ Sometimes, in his later days,” says Thackeray, 
“the good Duke had glimpses of mental light, when he would 
bid his musicians play the psalm tunes which he loved. One 
thinks, says he, of a descendant of his, two hundred years after- 
ward, blind, old, and lost of wits, singing Handel in Windsor 
Tower.” 
The fifteen children of William the Pious, had but a small 
inheritance, and the sons drew lots to determine which should 
marry and continue the line of Guelphs. Upon the sixth broth- 
er, George, the fortunate lot fell. You are familiar with the 
fortunes of his descendants, how after Queen Anne’s death, the 
English throne went to the distant Elector of Hanover, who 
did not even know the English tongue. He seems with his 
court, to have spent his days in plundering his subjects—his 
worthless and criminal wife, it is well known, was a state pris- 
oner for thirty-two years. The son, George II, knew no law 
but his passions. It was he who challenged his brother, King 
of Prussia, with sword and pistol, to settle a great transaction; 
day and seconds were chosen—-only the fear of the ridicule of Eu- 
rope stopped them. He lived among women unfit to touch the 
hem of the garments of the pure, the life of a Turk in his Ser- 
aglio. At sixty years of age he tainted society by bad ex- 
ample; gross and low, from youth to hoary age. 
The son whom he hated, and drove from his house, without 
his own children to accompany him, was Frederick, who died 
before reaching the throne, leaving a son, who was George III. 18 
The Bordek-Land of Insanity. 
George II was found dead, it was said, in an epileptic fit. Yet 
the new King never mentioned his father Frederick. What 
could he have been, hated and forgotten by parent and child ? 
George the III w’as a dull boy, of little brain, brought up 
'without much education, by a very domineering and narrow- 
minded woman. The child was kept in loneliness and gloom, 
deprived of pleasures, and filled with prejudices. The hard and 
cruel mother, once seeing the young Duke of Gloucester un- 
happy, sharply demanded why he was so silent. “ I am think- 
ing,” said the poor boy. “ Thinking, sir, of what ?” “ I am 
thinking if I ever have a son I will not make him so unhappy 
as you make me.” 
After his marriage with a plain but excellent German girl, the 
King lived a quiet country life, but the penalty of the trans- 
gression of former generations must be enforced. He was in- 
sane five times, first in 1165, when he was but twenty-seven. 
This followed immediately after a cure of a chronic eruption on 
his face. In 1778 his malady returned with fearful power. All 
the gestures a*nl ravings of the maniac appeared and the wild 
bowlings of a beast, lie attempted to throw himself from the 
window, and for a time it was thought life would give way. 
It lasted about five months, when he resumed the reins of power. 
The fact is a touching one, that an early act upon recovery was 
to visit a poor house and examine the new rooms being prepared 
for the more comfortable accommodation of lunatics, and express 
his gratification at the work of charity. 
Perhaps a single anecdote may be admissible here concerning 
his treatment. Although he soon became calm, and never 
evinced any disposition to strike or injure any person or furni- 
ture, he was subject to mechanical restraint to increase his self- 
control. Xo patient, not even the humblest wretch, would be 
subject now to the ordeal which he underwent. A writer relates 
that while walking through the palace during his convalescence, 
accompanied by an equerry, they observed a strait-jacket lying 
in a chair. The equerry, averting his look as if to conceal some 
embarrassment, the King said : “You need not be afraid to look 
at it. Perhaps it is the best friend that I ever had in my life.” 
The famous Dr. Willis was his physician and asserted that the 
attack came from “weighty business, severe exercise, too great The Border-Land of Insanity. 
19 
abstemiousness and little rest.” To illustrate his character, it 
is said that when Burke once asked Willis, in a parliamentary 
investigation, what he would have done it' the King had become 
violent, when on one occasion Willis had allowed him a razor 
against the advice of the other medical attendants—the reply 
at once was, “ There, sir, by the Eye ! I should have looked at 
him thus, sir—thus!” Burke is said to have averted his head in- 
stantly, and to have made no reply. George III was again seized 
in 1801; for a few months in 1804; and for the last time in 
1810, as he remained in that condition until his death in 1820. 
Among his delusions, was one that he could preserve an inter- 
course with the dead. Once in the council, addressing himself 
to two friends long in the grave, Sir Henry Halford, the court 
physician, reminded him that they were dead. “True,” was the 
reply, “they died to you and to the world in general, but not to 
me. You, Sir Henry, are forgetting that T have the power of 
holding intercourse with those whom you call dead. Yes, Sir 
Henry Halford, it is vain, so far as I am concerned, that you kill 
your patients.” When he had been several years a patient in 
Windsor Tower, he was found by the Queen one day singing a 
hymn and playing on the harpsichord. When he had finished, 
he knelt, prayed for his family and the nation, and implored the 
restoration of his mental powers. Suddenly he burst into tears, 
and the veil between him and his kind had fallen again. 
His entire reign was the era of the bitter strifes of Pitt,, Fox, 
Sheridan, Burke, and all the immortals of that age of British 
oratory. The poor dull King, with the common people at his 
back, arrayed himself against the patricians. He said he knew 
he wanted his people’s prosperity; so whoever did not think 
with him, and stand ready to obey, must be a traitor. 
Hence his war upon the colonies, which the approaching Cen- 
tennial brings back anew to every patriot. The Americans were 
petulant rebels, who must be taught to fear God and honor the 
King, much as his stern mother had disciplined him, and he suc- 
ceeded, and war was declared and prosecuted until overruled by 
Providence, for our national separation and the blessing of all 
mankind. The poor mad King, who bore a disease-stricken 
frame for eighty years, cried at last for mourning to wear, when 
he heard a funerel knell, for, said he, “ Poor George ITT ! T 
know he is dead.” 20 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
May we not hear again the parting words of the greatest writer 
of English in our day, who had himself known the partner 
of his bosom rent from his own side by insanity, and whose pure 
spirit has since gone to rest, with but a single gasp, on the quiet 
bed of sleep—Thackeray, who says, of the tale I have told you: 
“What preacher need moralize on this story; what words 
save the simplest are requisite to tell it ? It is too terrible for 
tears. The thought of such a misery smites me down in sub- 
mission before the Ruler of Kings and men, the Monarch Su- 
preme over empires and republics, the inscrutable Dispenser of 
life, death, happiness, victory.” 
“ O, brothers,” I said to those who heard me first in America, 
“ O, brothers; speaking the same dear mother tongue. O, com- 
rades, enemies no more, let us take a mournful hand together 
as we stand by this royal corpse and call a truce to battle ! 
Low he lies, to whom the proudest used to kneel once, and who 
was cast lower than the poorest; dead, whom millions prayed 
for in vain. Driven off his throne; buffetted by rude hands; 
with his children in revolt; the darling of his old age killed be- 
fore him ultimately; our Lear hangs over her breathless lips and 
cries: 
“Cordelia! Cordelia ! stay a little! ” 
“ Vex not his ghost—oh, let him pass—he hates him 
That would upon the rack of this tough world, 
Stretch him out longer!” 
Hush! Strife and quarrel, over the solemn grave! Sound 
trumpets, a mournful march. Fall, dark curtain, upon his pa- 
geant, his pride, his grief, his awful tragedy.” 
Turning from the royalty of place to that of human genius, 
and high fame, we are literally bewildered amid the throng of 
those upon whom brain disease laid its mark, whether lightly 
as the touch of a child, or even like the fiery brand of the ex- 
ecutioner. 
Among the ancient worthies, great Socrates himself did not 
escape; Plato and Xenophon, both speak of the familiar dciimony 
which he averred always accompanied him, and when it made 
its voice heard, always guided his plans. This has been supposed 
a hallucination of hearing. And what a man was the great 
philosopher, carrying his head in a strange position, with no 
occupation but preaching in the markets and shops, and pouring The Bokdee-Land of Insanity. 
21 
his relentless irony upon friend and foe, perhaps to return upon 
the world what he bore from his own wife. He is said by Dioge- 
nese Laertius to have remained an entire day, in a trance, in 
one position, standing and hearkening to a celestial voice, at the 
siege of Potidea. 
Yet this is the man, whose sublime doctrines, by ancient and 
modern alike, are confessed to be first in the heathen world. 
I will not dwell upon the references in ancient lore to the 
madness of Hercules and Ajax, Ulysses and Lysander, Bellero- 
phon and Plato himself. 
But, in the more modern times, we find Tasso, the immortal 
author of “ Jerusalem Delivered,” shut up for years, a victim of 
the wildest delusions. 
Benvenuto Cellini, the artist, sees a resplendent light hover- 
ing over his own shadow. 
liaffaelle himself declared that while painting the Transfigu- 
ration, that magnificent creation of human genius, he might 
well have been considered an enthusiastic madman. He forgot 
himself absolutely, and the whole action passed before his eyes. 
Pascal, whenever in intense thought, beheld a fiery gulf open 
by his side. If his attendants placed a chair between him and 
the precipice, composure might return, as he beheld an obstacle 
between himself and danger. So portentous is the power of 
diseased imagination. 
Descartes, whom I need not characterize as one of the great- 
est minds known to fame, was followed, as he supposed, by an 
invisible person, calling on him to search for truth. 
Metastasio, avIio described in his exquisite writings the sensa- 
tions of incipient madness, drew it from his own unhappy expe- 
rience. 
Cruclen, the author of the famous Concordance to the Bible, 
wrote it while insane. He was three times within an asylum, 
once before he was twenty years of age. 
Joan of Arc, the maid of France, suffered from a physical 
disorder, which any physician recognizes now as the forerunner 
of insanity, and a thousand facts show that this maiden of poetry 
was a victim of a form of insanity, in which there is the full con- 
viction of the possession of supernatural power. 
Kean, the actor, died from mental strain, in personating 
Othello. 22 
Tjie Border-Land of Insanitt. 
Rousseau, was followed by a life-long delusion that he was 
persecuted by the entire world. 
Jerome Cardan, greatest physician and natural philosopher 
of his tune, was tormented with hallucinations, as was Paracel- 
sus, also. 
Pascal, to whom I have already referred, and whose mathe- 
matics were only second to Newton, after he had broken down 
his physical frame by fastings and vigils, and overworked his 
weary brain, actually wore an amulet against the demoniac visi- 
tations that destroyed his peace. 
Indeed “overwork of the brain” it has been justly said, “is 
unlike an excess of labor when demanded of other organs. 
They refuse to discharge their functions when overtasked, or 
gradually gaining rest, are at last enabled to accomplish the 
task. Overworking the stomach destroys the appetite, and the 
duty is no longer imposed. Overworking the muscular system 
does not break down that, but rather the nervous system with 
which it is so nearly connected. The overworked lungs throw 
part of their work on the liver, and the overworked liver on the 
kidneys. But the overworked brain finds no helpmate in the 
economy of the organism.” 
Lest one appear to judge rashly, let us look more closely to 
the record. 
Torquato Tasso, whose “ Jerusalem Delivered,” alone ranks 
with the Paradise Lost, the Iliad, and the Divina Commedia, the 
four great epics of mankind, was born in 1544, and was the son 
of the poet, Bernardo Tasso. To scan his life in few lines, his 
young brain was tortured with Greek and Latin, at seven years. 
At seventeen he had written an epic. It was in 1505 
that he met Lucretia and Leonora, sisters of the Duke of 
Ferrara at the court. With them he lives in close friend- 
ship, and for them he entertains the loftiest admiration. 
While at the ducal court he hears that his great poem has been 
published by stealth in an Italian city, without his authority or 
the corrections he designed. This unmans him, he imagines 
himself pursued by enemies, and even draws his sword upon 
the peaceful servant of the Duchess of Urbino. He is arrested, 
but his condition speaking for itself, is given to the care of a 
physician. Soon he grows worse—he leaves even his beloved Till; Bokdeu-Land ok Insanity. 
23 
manuscripts behind and flies. Bye and bye be begs to be allow- 
ed to return, but the evil recurs, and he once more roams away 
to Mantua, Padua, Venice, everywhere fleeing an imaginary 
pursuer. 
At last he ventures again to Ferrara, and no one noticing the 
poor wretch, he abuses the Duke in the presence of his court. 
For this he languishes long years in a prison cell at St. Anne’s 
Hospital, while all through the Italian peninsular six editions of 
his wonderful poem are enriching the publishers and delighting 
the people to such a pitch that, until this day, the very peasants 
know and repeat his musical stanzas. 
Seven years of dreary confinement ensued long after apparent 
restoration, but the malady recurs at Florence and also at Rome. 
For just as he had reached the fruition of his hopes, and by a 
solemn act, the Pope had decreed his coronation with the poet’s 
laurel on the 25th of April, 1595, that very day the exhausted 
frame succumbs, and the garlands of honor fall upon the brow 
of death. 
In tracing the history of extraordinary men who have lived in 
extraordinary delusions, the name of Emanuel Swendenborg 
must not be forgotten. This celebrated philosopher, a geolo- 
gist and man of scientific learning, filled many offices of dis- 
tinction in Sweden, from which he voluntarily retired when, as 
he says, he was introduced to the spiritual world, while in Lon- 
don in 1743. For about thirty years he spent his time alter- 
nately in Sweden and England, holding converse, as he believed, 
with heavenly spirits and receiving their revelations. He imag- 
ined that he maintained long conversations with the most emi- 
nent of the dead of antiquity. He described with minute detail 
the form and fashion of the abodes of blessed saints in Heaven, 
and his works fill many volumes. In private life he was honest, 
learned, virtuous and a profound thinker. 
These revelations were received while he was in long bodily 
trances, not much unlike the state the pathologist recognizes in 
various unhappily disordered constitutions. He died of sudden 
brain disease, apoplexy, in 1772. You say perhaps, that he only 
differed from other lunatics, by a purer life and more intense 
mentality, and has long been forgotten. No indeed, his church 
is to-day one of the recognized religious denominations of this 24 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
country, and there are edifices for Swedenborgian services, in 
many of the largest and most intelligent cities of the United 
States. 
Some of his prophecies have been regarded as wonderfully 
correct, such as predicting a great fire at Stockholm at the very 
hour of its occurrence. But to one who would inquire farther, it 
is only necessary to say, that angel and saint and demon, all 
talk in his books, as ordinary men of the eighteenth century did, 
and all the minute explanations of natural phenomena, alas, are 
based only upon the rude conception of a century ago, and 
none of his revelations anticipated the truth even as it is known 
to-day. Yet, to this day a million or two of people are enthralled 
by the fascination of a maniac’s dream ! 
I approach the name of the Colossus of English literature 
with profound reverence. Never was the truth more deeply il- 
lustrated that the mind’s great powers lie behind and beyond 
and immeasurably above the miserable accidents of bodily or- 
ganization, and yet never was the dividing wall that in the play 
of fitful disease cuts off the communion of the nobler part, with 
fallen man, more sadly, but vividly displayed, than in Samuel 
Johnson. 
Samuel Johnson the great essayist, the formative artist of 
late English, the author of the exquisite Basselas, the compiler 
of the first Dictionary of our tongue, which has been a mine of 
wealth for all its successors—Johnson, the good and great, who 
bore the ills of fate with such fortitude, maintained his integrity 
in the sorest temptation, and became the very arbiter of the 
tongue he spake, by universal consent, him we have known, but 
how is our sympathy increased when we know his inner life. It 
is full of lessons to illustrate what I would say to-night. 
His father was beyond fifty and his mother over forty when 
they wrere married. The father was afflicted with melancholy, 
and only saved from absolute insanity by constant horseback 
exercise. With a sedentary life, he at once relapsed. Samuel 
was himself scrofulous, and was even taken to London, prayed 
over, and touched by Queen Anne, but unfortunately it was of 
no avail. He was blind in one eye, the result of his disease, 
and subject from his earliest years, to moods of the deepest gloom. 
We are told by his biographer in significent language, that “his Tiie Border-Land of Insanity. 
25 
malady broke out before he left the University, in a cruel form.” 
In his twentieth year it came upon him in a dreadful manner. 
It happened at Litchfield in the college vacation of 1729, and he 
was never perfectly restored. He declared long after that all his 
labors and enjoyments were “ mere interruptions of its baleful 
influence.” 
Sometimes he was unable to tell the hour by the clock. He 
walked to Birmingham and back again, frequently, in hope to 
drive it away by forcible exertions. He placed his medical su- 
pervision in the hands of his god-father, Dr. Swinfen, and was 
mortally offended when the Doctor revealed the truth to his 
own daughter. Again and again, he touchingly laments his 
constant hovering upon insanity. In writing of the unfortunate 
poet Collins, who was in confinement, he says: “Poor Collins ! 
I have often been near his state, and have it therefore in great 
commiseration.” 
He would place his hand on all the posts set by the sidewalk 
in the streets, and if by chance he missed one, he was unhappy 
until his steps were retraced. He would shut himself up for 
days, to walk from room to room sighing and groaning; to go 
out of doors he must take a certain number of steps, and with a 
certain accustomed foot, in a definite place. 
His grimaces, gestures, and mutterings terrified strangers. 
At a dinner table, he would stoop down, and twitch off a lady’s 
shoe. He would conceive an aversion to a particular street, and 
could not be induced to walk there. The poet Christopher 
Smart, it is well known, who was afterwards committed to an 
asylum, exhibited his mental disturbance, by falling on his knees 
to say his prayers in the street. Like him, Johnson would sud- 
denly call out sentences of the Lord’s prayer while in a crowded 
drawing-room, and in the gayest company. 
With senses morbidly asleep, and imagination morbidly active, 
his life was one long torture. Many a man, so wretched, would 
have shot or hanged himself. He had the appetite of a beast 
of prey; were the meat spoiled or the butter rancid, so much 
the better, he would devour until the veins of his forehead 
swelled to repletion. Hallucinations of hearing pursued him,— 
miles away, again and again, he thought he could hear his 
mother call him by name. 26 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
Yet he struggles manfully, he feels that he is lost, unless hy 
stern self control, he may stay the on-rushing tide. He drinks 
less wine, and never at night any more; he struggles to moder- 
ate his appetite, seeks exercise, and keeps his mind busily em- 
ployed. 
Shall I tell you whom he marries? With all courtesy to the 
sex, he marries a widow, as old as his own mother, short, fat, 
coarse in manners and in features, painted, deeply dressed in gau- 
dy colors, and void of grace. But with his one eye, and that 
short sighted, he pronounces her lovely, is a true and loving 
and noble husband, and long after he buries her in her sixty- 
fourtli year, speaks of her to his friends, as “ Pretty Crea- 
ture!” 
lie writes Rasselas to defray the expenses of his mother’s fu- 
neral. As the years go by, oblivion creeps over him, and he is 
wrapped in complete idleness and despondency. When in Kent, 
September 18th, 1768, he writes : “ I have now begun the sixtieth 
year of my life. How the last year has been passed I am un- 
willing to terrify myself with thinking. I wras disturbed at 
church this day in an uncommon degree and my distress has had 
little intermission. This day it came into my mind to wrrite the 
history of my melancholy. I know not whether it may not too 
much disturb me. 
Eight years after, he writes: “ When I survey my past life, I 
discern nothing but a barren wraste of time, with some disorders 
of body, and disturbances of mind very near to madness, which 
I hope He that made me will suffer to extenuate mv many 
faults.” 
He had the gait of one in fetters; his habits were uncouth, 
voice loud and imperious, temper violent, and a great readiness 
to take offence. He advises Boswell against melancholy in 
these words, good for all times: “ If you are idle, be not soli- 
tary; if you are solitary, be not idle.” 
He loved poor Savage, another wretched poet and unhappy 
man of genius. The wildest romance would barely equal this 
man’s real fate. As a famous writer says: “An Earl’s son, and 
a shoemaker’s apprentice, he feasted among blue ribbons in 
St. James’ Square, and lay W'th fifty pounds weight of iron on 
his legs in the condemned ward of Newgate. He dined on The Border-Land of Insanity. 
27 
venison and champagne when lie might borrow a guinea; to- 
morrow he appeased the rage of hunger with scraps of broken 
meats, and lay under the piazza of Covent Garden, or as near as 
he could get in the ashes of a glass house. When these sons of 
misfortune parted, it was in tears; Johnson to his long internal 
strife, Savage to die heart broken, in the West of England, in 
Bristol Jail. 
In 1784, Dr. Johnson left his friends at Litchfield one morn- 
ing, and set off at an early hour, returning at night weary and 
drenched with rain. There was a silence—no one ventured to 
ask the reason. After a solemn pause, he said that fifty years 
before, during an illness of his father’s, he had refused that 
father’s request to ride to Uttoxeter market and take his accus- 
tomed place at the stall where he sold books—all out of boyish 
pride. To do away with this sin, he said, that day he had stood 
in the market place bareheaded in the pelting rain for one hour, 
before his father’s ancient stall, exposed to the jeers of the popu- 
lace, performing solemn penance in the sight of Heaven. 
Monumental marble now represents him in that act of filial de- 
votion. The end was soon to come—rapidly recurring fits of 
anger and melancholy are succeeded by a stroke of paralysis; for 
a while he cannot speak and cannot write. Dropsy, so common 
with the insane, closed the scene. The next year, December 13, 
1784, the fatal moment, which had been an unutterable dread 
all his life, came to find hin in serene frame, patient and gentle, 
his noble mind, his true self, ready for translation to a world of 
peace, with the dark clouds of a life-time rolled away forever. 
The temptation to dwell upon the characteristics of those 
whom we may well term the Illustrious Insane, may carry us too 
far, but in certain cases, it is indispensable to the faithfulness of 
the picture, to portray the details thereof. 
The case of the renowned Dean Swift I need not dwell upon. 
Of him it was said: 
“Rich in imborrowed wit, thy various page 
By turns displays the patriot, poet, sage.” 
He was afflicted through life witli vertigo—the result he says, 
of cerebral congestion, caused by eating an hundred golden pip- 
pins at one time—irritable, strange, gloomy—at last he went 28 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
months without speaking. Ilis great cruelty too, and extra- 
ordinary perfidy to the women who loved him, foreshadowed his 
future. With prophetic hand he wrote: 
“ See here the Dean begins to break, 
Poor gentleman, he droops apace, 
Yon plainly find it in his face; 
That old vert igo in his head 
Will never leave him till lie's dead.” 
St. Patrick’s Hospital for lunatics was built and endowed by 
him for the people of Dublin, at a cost of eleven thousand 
pounds. This institution still exists, yearly working out its 
share of blessing, while its great founder moulders in the grave. 
For the last four or five years of his life, he fell into a state of 
idiocy, locking his lips in the silence of the tomb. 
The names of Johnson and Swift suggest that of Pope, whose 
fame will last as long as the Universal Prayer remains as it is, 
one of the most superb expressions of thought in our language. 
Is it possible that there was anything abnormal in the constitu- 
tion of Alexander Pope, the friend of wits and statesmen, the 
keen satirist, and the model of English poetry for two genera- 
tions ? What says the stern historic muse ? 
Dr. Johnson says, Pope had disease of the stomach and liver, 
from which came absolute hypochondriasis. “Feeble at the 
best, he finally required perpetual female attendance. So great 
was his sensibility to cold, that he wore a fur doublet, under a 
shirt of coarse woven linen. He was placed in a bodice of stiff 
canvas when he arose, and could hardly hold himself erect until 
it was laced. Then came a flannel waistcoat. Ilis slender legs 
required three pairs of stockings, and he could not dress or un- 
dress without the help of the maid. Often he was a picture of 
misery complete, quarreled with his friends—symptoms of pres- 
sure on the brain appeared, and he sighed for death to end his 
physical and mental agony. By the active medical aid of Sir 
Samuel Garth alone, was his mind restored to a healthy tone after 
these attacks. 
I cannot forbear to note a discovery of very recent date, that 
bears all the marks of an insane act. Prompted by the inordi- 
nate vanity that often appears in cerebral disease, he ardently 
desired to publish his correspondence during his own life-time, The Border-Land of Insanity. 
29 
and determined to use the petty artifice of concealing the truth, 
by making it appear, that the publication was forced upon him 
through the unprincipled conduct of others whom he pretended, 
gave to the public garbled fragments of it. 
lie robbed himself of his own letters, conveyed them piece- 
meal and by feigned hands to the publishers, and accused others 
of the theft—among them Dean Swift, who was then imbecile 
and shut up from the world. Having prepared the literary cir- 
cle for what he called his genuine correspondence, as published 
in his own name, he now wrote and gave forth a fictitious one; 
letters which his correspondents returned at his own request, 
were re-written, re-dated, and re-addressed to personages that 
seemed more likely to bring him credit. 
A late English reviewer happily compares this proceeding to 
the detective’s story in Oliver Twist, relating to the keeper of a 
public house, who gave out that he had been robbed of three 
hundred pounds, and was relieved by liberal subscription from 
his neighbors. He went so far as to have an officer in his house, 
who, for a long time saw nothing at all, and listened to every- 
thing without seeming to, which showed that he understood his 
business. But one morning he walked into the bar, and taking 
out his snuff-box, said : 
“ duckweed, I’ve found who’s done this here robbery.” 
“Have you,” said Chickweed; “oh my dear Spyers, only let 
me have wengeance, and I shall die contented.” 
“ Come,” said Spyers, offering him a pinch of snuff, “none of 
that gammon— you did it yourself,” and so he had, too, and a 
pretty bit of money he made by it. 
Pope was a sickly boy, without brother or sister to correct his 
morbid tendencies; he grew up without healthy control, intensely 
self-conscious, petted, spoiled, vain, indelicate, even malignant, 
and perhaps the key-note of his life was that this puny skeleton 
was a parody of the men of the world and of pleasure about 
him. 
But in the survey of the vast field before us, probably no fact 
will more astonish the casual reader than the constant and re- 
curring proof of brain disease and abnormal organization in a 
long line of British poets for more than a century and a half 
just past. 30 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
To begin with Gray, the sweet singer, whose music echoes in 
our hearts, “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day”—how 
rude the shock to know that this child of a father of violent pas- 
sions and brutal manners, was a prey to feebleness, indolence, 
trivial derangements of mind and body, with numberless little 
affectations, absurdly sensitive, and disputations. lie changed 
his home of twenty years (Peter House at Cambridge) on account 
of a silly joke of the college boys upon his peculiarities. His 
life passed in visions of immortal labors that never saw the 
light. 
Darker and sadder was the fate of Collins, his cotemporary, a 
lyric poet of the first rank, whose ode on the Passions is to-day 
in every choice selection wherever English is read. When first 
published, his works were unread and unappreciated. Receiving 
a legacy from a rich uncle, he paid voluntarily all the losses of the 
publisher, and burned the unsold edition. Insanity came on, he 
traveled to shake it off in foreign lands, but only to return to the 
Lunatic Asylum, such as it was in that day,—how terrible a 
home for such a spirit. Pathetic is the account of the scene 
at Islington. When Dr. Johnson visited him in its dreary 
wards, he was holding a book in his hand, having given up 
earthly hopes and fame. Said he, with trembling speech: “I 
have but one book now, but it is the best.” It was the New 
Testament. 
He died at thirty-six, and after he had gone, his odes steadily 
rose in esteem until a hundred years after, they were pronounced 
the best in our literature. They have been said to partake of 
the enthusiasm of Tasso, the magic wildness of Shakespeare, the 
sublimity of Milton, and the pathos of Ossian. Too late, that 
judgment, for the fevered brain and broken heart. 
Next in time, but greater in importance, is William Cowper, 
the first of the modern school poets, the bold genius who threw 
off the thraldoms of Pope and all the classical school, and in a 
single poem, and almost in a day, revolutionized English 
thought, and prepared the era of Byron, Scott and Wordsworth. 
His calamity is more widely known and acknowledged than 
that of any other of this galaxy of the poets, but it is not with- 
out deep interest. 
It is a mournful life over which many have wondered at the The Bokdek-Land of Insanity. 
31 
suffering of the man, and the vitality of the poet. The delicate 
child of a Hertfordshire parson, he was articled as an attorney, 
but abandoned it. Twelve years he spent in the Temple—ap- 
pointed to a clerkship which required a public appearance in the 
House of Lords for one occasion only, he fancies the clerks 
against him, and was overcome in the struggle to fit himself for 
its duties, lie hopes he will go mad or die, and in going mad, 
attempts to commit suicide. One time he will drown himself, 
but some one in the way prevents; he has the poison at his lips, 
but is interrupted; he tries to stab himself, and finally does 
hang himself, but the garter breaks. For the time, the shock 
restores him. The office abandoned, the excuse of his insanity 
is religion. He is not one of the elect, and the angry eyes of 
the Almighty are forever watching him. For two years he is 
placed under restraint at St. Albans, under care of Dr. Cotton. 
For a time he loves his cousin Theodora Cowper, but her father 
objects. “If you marry William Cowper, what will you do?” 
“ Do, sir,” the intrepid girl replied, “ wash all day and go out 
to ride upon the great dog at night.” She spent a lifetime 
faithful to Cowper, in loneliness and solitude; but, he alas ! 
forgot her in the selfishness—the intense self-consciousness of 
his life. In the words of a great writer: 
“ Beautiful and amiable as his character was, the capacity of 
strenuous loving might have been its salvation. A man who is 
able to throw himself into the existence of another, to seek with 
vehemence the welfare of another, has the strongest safeguard 
ever given by God against all the evils that result from brood- 
ing over and becoming absorbed in the sufferings of self. In 
all the combinations of human circumstance, true love is well 
nigh the only combatant strong enough to overthrow that last 
and subtlest enemy of man.” 
He goes to Huntingdon, and boards in the family of Mr. Un- 
win, after whose death, he still remains for many years the close 
friend and inmate of the widow’s house—the Mary Unwin 
whose patient devotion and unselfish kindness will live as long 
as Cowper’s fame. It is a life of monastic seclusion, hymns and 
prayers and sermons, with an occasional evening walk, occupy 
their days and nights—the Rev. John Newton being their neigh- 
bor and friend. Cowper renounces all his former friends, the 32 
The Boeder-Land ob' Insanity. 
gloom thickens, and the storm bursts suddenly again, while he 
was one day at the vicarge—although so near his home, with 
their gardens adjoining, he was then eighteen months before he 
could be moved to Mrs. Unwin’s. 
He recovers like a child after long illness, builds chairs and 
bird-cages, and tames his hares. He tries a little drawing and 
returns, at last, to books. It was then that Mrs. Unwin sug- 
gested that he write a poem. 
Accepting this thought eagerly, he writes and published 
“The Progress of Error,” but as his old friends take no notice 
of it, he quivers with wrath and indignation. Lady Austen 
tells him the story of John Gilpin’s Ride, at which he laughs all 
night, and writes his famous verses, so irresistibly comic. When 
he begs her for another subject, she suggests “The Sofa,” with 
a smile, and straightway he composes “ The Task,” hardly 
dreaming that he wrould accomplish a revolution in a day. Says 
a writer: 
“ England had fancied herself to have outlived the lofty mel- 
ody of blank verse. She discovered now that the old strain was 
her favorite—that it could charm her ear, as well as rouse her 
soul. She found out that nature was as sweet as it had been in 
the days of Milton, the English fields as fair, the rural sights 
and sounds as fresh and tender. This worn and sick man, grow- 
ing old, fanatic, half madman, half recluse, drew the veil from 
her eyes, and threw open to her a new, sweet, dewy, fragrant 
world. It is difficult for us to imagine the surprised delight 
with which the nation felt the sweetness of this voice, which 
was so familiar, so homelike, so unpretending. Poetry had been 
for a century a thing of the coffee-houses and the wits. Cowper 
sprang at a bound into a place more deeply set in the popular 
heart than Pope ever attained.” 
His work well nigh done, the shadows crept up from the au- 
tumnal fields. In the last glimmerings of evening light, when 
Mary Unwin had already felt the warning touch of paralysis, 
he writes his most perfect productions—strange anomaly of 
genius. These were the “Verses to My Mother’s Picture” and 
“To Mary.” 
In 1794, Mary Unwin falls into dotage, and Cowper in turn, 
becomes the nurse. What a solemn picture ! One imbecile bab- The Border-Land of Insanity. 
33 
bling and laughing in her weakness, the other sitting still and 
silent as death, speaking to no one, asking nothing, dwelling in 
a visionary world of diseased fancy. She dies, but in his gath- 
ering stupor he knows it not. They take him to a quiet parson- 
age in Norfolk where he sits with wild sad eyes, listening to the 
moan of the sea. Three years of darkness he survives, writing 
the “ Castaway,” last and saddest of his poems, in the last year 
of his life. In the closing year of the century he dies in des- 
pair, but we may trust to wake in hope. 
The lover of his literature is irresistibly attracted by the group 
of the Lake Poets, as they are called, and their friends, whose 
history is forever associated with peaceful Westmoreland, 
Wordsworth and Southey, Coleridge, Lloyd Lovell and Charles 
Lamb. If one pronounces that the mark of brain disease was 
upon all of them, the reader is startled and declares that enthu- 
siasm is carrying judgment beyond its bounds. But what are 
the facts ? 
Three of these married sisters, and all, were engaged in 
a scheme to found a new Society on the Susquehanna, which 
should show mankind how to live. In later days, Lloyd became 
a raving maniac, and escaping from control in England, is ar- 
rested in France, and dies in a Parisian Asylum. Coleridge, 
with perhaps the grandest metaphysical intellect ever bestowed 
upon man, and the author of a fragment which no man that ever 
lived could finish, the wonderful “Ancient Mariner,” after show- 
ing signs of the evil to come, finally accelerated his ruin and 
went to utter wreck with opium. De Quincey, who has written 
for us the horrors of opium eating, says: 
“ It was a fine saying Of Addison that Babylon in ruins is not 
so affecting a spectacle, or so solemn, as a human mind over- 
thrown by lunacy. How much more awful then, and more 
magnificent a wreck when a treachery of his own will, and the 
conspiracy as it were, of himself against himself. 
Southey, the poet and historian, died of lingering cerebral dis- 
ease. Wordsworth, the cool, calm, reflective poet, the last man 
to have such a thought associated with him, we are told by his 
sister in mysterious language, was overwhelmed by a nervous 
attack, at the sights of the French Revolution in Paris, whither 34 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
he had gone, and we all know that his later days were passed in 
mental oblivion, for he died of softening of the brain. 
Charles Lamb, the remaining one of the friends,—who does 
not love the picture of shambling ungainly form, but yet the 
kindly eye and the generous hand, and the courteous gentleman 
and the most delightful essayist that ever handled pen? His 
was a consecrated life, ever shadowed by the disease that 
wrought such havoc in his family. Born of a paralytic mother, 
he was himself confined in 1796, in an Asylum, at Hoxton. 
Mary Lamb, his devoted sister, killed her own mother by stab- 
bing, in a sudden access of insanity, and from the moment 
Charles devoted himself to her life-long care. Renouncing his 
love and all thought of marriage, he determined to live for her. 
Whenever the seasons of insanity approached they took their 
solitary way to the Asylum, she packing her clothes, with the 
garments of restraint and all. Joyfully receiving the signal of 
her improvement, he was wont to go back to lead her home 
again. Beautiful lesson of devotion and brotherly love ! 
In Byron’s Childe Harold appear these lines: 
“ I have thought 
Too long and darkly, till my brain became, 
In its own eddy boiling and o’er wrought, 
A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame; 
And thus untaught in youth my heart to tame, 
My springs of life were poisoned.” 
George Gordon Byron was the son of a wild roue, known as 
Mad Jack Byron, who lived a life of libertinism. His great- 
uncle, William Lord Byron, killed his relative, Mr. Chaworth, 
with the sword in a fit of passion. Byron’s mother was a high- 
tempered Highland woman, driven half mad by a spendthrift 
husband. Once an heiress, but ruined in purse, and temper and 
nerves, by turns she fondled and scolded her solitary, weak, club- 
footed, and epileptic boy. At eleven he becomes Lord Byron, 
and from the deepest poverty they pass to the elegance of New- 
stead Abbey. For fear of the termagant mother, his guardian 
stands aloof, and the unhappy boy enters life without discip- 
line, with no one to respect, and no one that he loves. A trifling 
book of juvenile poems is harshly criticized, and he springs to 
the arena, the Minerva of his genius full born, with a quiver of Tiie Border-Land of Insanity. 
35 
poisoned arrows. The whole earth shook with the onset, and 
fame was made. He has no friends—he takes his seat in the 
House of Lords a stranger. With disappointment in his soul 
he flies to the East. When he returns, Ohilde Harold has made 
him the lion of London, and he finds himself, says Moore, 
“among its illustrious crowds, the most distinguished object.” 
In the meantime, he lost his mother—she, poor thing, although 
she could not agree with him, really loved him, and believed in 
his genius. And he—the moment the funeral procession leaves 
the door—when all but those too of that household, had gone to 
the grave for the last solemn rites over the ashes of his mother, 
he goes to work with his boxing-gloves and has a violent spar- 
ring match with his servant. 
It was a wild physical outburst of dumb misery and defiance— 
that defiance of pain and of better emotions that distinguished 
his whole life. 
We need not recount the miserable story of his marriage and 
separation, nor the recital of his dark vices; nor have we time 
to comment upon the kindly acts his better soul would com- 
mand, as related by Countess Guiccioli. His long line of 
brilliant poems the world knows by heart. Unhappily the me- 
moirs were destroyed, which would have revealed to the world 
more fully the nature of the vulture that preyed upon his life. 
From time to time recurrent attacks of his epilepsy appeared, 
the last happening in the Spring of 1822, when in Greece, upon 
his expedition to aid the patriots in recovering their freedom. 
Riding out in bad weather, before he recovered from the pro- 
longed prostration of his last dreadful seizure, he succumbed 
and died after a brief illness. The epitaph has been pronounced 
upon him: 
“Never was life less happy nor more forlorn, nor an end more 
pitiful. Thus all was ended upon earth of a man who had re- 
ceived every gift which heaven could bestow, except the con- 
trol of the glorious faculties that God had placed in his hands.” 
What a contrast is he to Walter Scott, who, when he is in- 
volved deeply in debt by his kindness to others, rallies his brain 
to labor, and in less than three years, alone by the work of his 
pen, pays a hundred and forty thousand dollars of the sum. He 
cries out, “Oh, invention, rouse thyself—may man be kind, may 36 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
God be propitious. The worst is,” he sadly adds, “I never quite 
know when I am right or wrong. He bears up under two 
strokes of paralysis. Still, like galley-slave, he labors. Con- 
fusion of thoughts by day, unutterable weariness and pain by 
night. When friends tell him his last book (Count Robert) is 
a failure, he only says, pitifully: ‘God knows I am at sea and 
in the dark, and the vessel leaking too, I think. I have suffered 
terribly, and I often wish I could lie down and sleep without 
waking.’ But I will fight it out if I can. Did I know how to 
begin I would begin again this very day, though I knew I should 
sink at the end.” 
He struggled until the light went out. His wife died by his 
side when he most needed help. With one faithful child by 
him, he toiled on. He makes a journey of despair to Italy and 
returns to meet his doom. The greatest works of his genius, it 
well has been pronounced, pale before the wrork of his life. 
Scotland holds him the type of her race, the flower of her 
genius, the noblest, truest and most gifted of all the Scots who 
glory in the name. 
The poet Shelley, some compassionate hand has described as 
“a wild and wayward figure, like the Faun of the imagination, 
or those strange and beautiful beings dwelling between earth 
and heaven, on the heights of Gothic fancy.” 
He was a spirit of the intermediary world—a wandering 
genie,—nothing more. Before twenty years of his young life 
had gone by, he had cut himself off from his family, and ruined 
his career. He was a spirit of the race of Ariel. 
At Eton, aged fifteen, his one idea is resistance to God, to 
man, to laws, to authority, to whatever opposed him. This, in- 
deed, is the central idea of his greatest poem, Prometheus. 
He leaves his classes to study electricity under a Dr. Lind, 
when he and his preceptor indulge in bouts of blasphemy, striv- 
ing each to curse the heavier, the one his father, the other the 
King—often at midnight he sallies forth in hope to call up the 
evil spirit. 
At Oxford, see him a slim lad with unnaturally brilliant eyes, 
stooping shoulders, and strange voice, like a peacock’s cry—he 
lives amid his crucibles, feeds upon bread almost entirely, which 
he tears from the loaf as he walks, lingers for hours to throw The Border-Land of Insanity. 
37 
stones in ponds, or sailing paper boats. That was his passion 
all his life, and he has been known to use a fifty pound note, 
when no other paper was near. Engaged in zealous debate, he 
would suddenly stop, fall like a cat on the rug, and sleep for 
hours with his little round head exposed to the fiercest heat. 
He imagines, and tells everybody, when he was expelled, that 
it was for publishing a book on Infidelity, a pure delusion, for he 
had only read it. The sentence really was, on account of his 
scurrilous letters to eminent men, who were strangers to him. 
His sisters sent him money by Harriet Westbrook, their 
schoolfellow. She hates the tyranny of school, and he marries 
her in his sympathy—one sixteen, the other not nineteen, to go 
roaming through England, Scotland and Wales. Finally they 
drift to Ireland—and for what, to issue pamphlets and speak 
for Catholic Emancipation. Returning to Wales, he imagines 
some one has fired at him and put a hole through his gown. He 
utters a breathless cry to his friends for breathing time and 
twenty pounds. They pay it and smile, but he declares all the 
after fluctuations of his health were due to that shock. In 
this year, 1813, Queen Mab was written. This, the most cele- 
brated of his works, is to investigate what he called the horrors 
of Religion, the falsehood of Revelation and the cruel fiction of 
Christianity. 
Next year he falls in love with Mary Godwin, and reveals it 
in a strange scene within St. Pancras’ churchyard, by the grave 
of her own mother—he told her if supported by her love, he 
would enrol his name among the wise and good. He abandons 
his wife at the cottage in Brockwell, his child, the baby Ianthe, 
and his unborn babe, to fly to the continent with Mary, never 
to see wife and children again. 
Yet he speaks in quiet friendliness of this abandoned wife, 
this desolate mother, not yet twenty, and proposes to a lawyer 
that Harriet be invited to join his new household in the capacity 
of humble friend to himself and Mary, and can hardly be brought 
to see the impossibility of such a proposal. Despite his sweet 
amiability, the betrayed wife bore her sorrows two years and 
then drowned herself. 
Now he marries Mary, and going to Switzerland, where they 
meet Byron, a dark episode in their lives ensues, upon which the 38 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
pen refuses to touch—let it be buried in night! How could 
such a man write 
“Life like a dome of many colored glass 
Stains the white radiance of eternity!” 
He rages against English law, because now he is rich, the 
custody of the children is denied to him who murdered their 
mother—children whose home he has passed many a time, and 
never once turned to look upon—the unnatural father. 
Driven by a delusion that the child of Mary will be taken 
from them by the law, he hastens to Italy. There that hateful 
poem is given to the world, “ Beatrice Cenci.” 
Strange anomaly, that the brain which conceived that hideous 
dream, should have produced the “ Sky-lark.” 
lie wanders from Pisa to Rome, from Venice to Naples, mak- 
ing romances to himself of lovelorn ladies following him afar 
off. Ilis thirtieth year was not completed when his frail pleas- 
ure yacht went down in the Bay of Spezzia, and his washed up 
corpse was burned by his friends with a theatrical show of in- 
cremation. Poor wandering voice, absolutely dead to the dis- 
tinctions of right and wrong, to true love for kindred, or rever- 
ence for God. 
Yet his admirers, the Swinburnes and Rossettis of to-day, call 
him “ the greatest English poet since Milton, and the greatest 
Englishman of his time.” Who can doubt, that but for acci- 
dent, the torch of life would have burned out with the glare of 
madness. 
I feel that this sad catalogue should come to a close, and will 
but briefly say that among the great number whose names be- 
long here, are the melancholy poets, Pollok and Young, Har- 
rington, the author of the famous “ Oceana,” whose madness 
was extreme; Simon Browne, the celebrated divine, whose delu- 
sion was that his soul was annihilated; Robert Boyle, the philos- 
opher, who could barely refrain from suicide; Metastasio, the 
father of Italian opera, and Robert Hall, of whom Prof. Sedg- 
wick declares, “For moral grandeur, for Christian truth and 
sublimity, we may doubt whether his sermons have their match 
in the sacred oratory of any age or century.” 
Observe that Robert Hall read Butler’s Anology and Edwards The Border-Land of Insanity. 
39 
on the “Will” at nine years of age, wrote religious essays at 
ten, became a Baptist minister at sixteen, and laboring at mental 
work twelve hours a day, soon was conveyed to the ward of an 
asylum, and upon recovery and rash excess in work again, was 
sent once more to its friendly walls. The great critic Dugald 
Stewart, endorsed by the Reviews, affirms: “Whoever wishes 
to see the English language in perfection, must read the writ- 
ings of Robert Hall.” 
Who that heard it forgets the thrill through Christendom 
when the world knew that Hugh Miller had taken his own life. 
By constitution superstitious, and morbidly suspicious, the child 
of a sea-faring man lost in a storm, his mother tilled the boy’s 
mind with weird Celtic tales, the ferment of superstitious fears. 
Battling in after days between skepticism and truth, he cut him- 
self fearful back strokes; all his life a terrific intensity of mental 
vision characterized him, and the victim of misunderstandings 
among friends, and the chimeras of his fancy, he died at his 
table by his own hand, in a dark hour when reason had left her 
throne. 
Paganini, the violinist, whose execution has never been equal- 
led by mortal man, was a being with an intensely susceptible 
nervous system, often deprived of the powers of speech, with a 
pale, bony face, frequently of livid green—at times it was said 
he seemed to be out of the body. His contradictions he could 
not himself explain—dashing from city to city with utmost 
speed, with all the windows of the carriage closed even in the 
hottest weather, he entered no inn, nor spoke when he was ad- 
dressed. Arrived at his hotel he removed his clothes, and threw 
open doors and windows for what he called his air bath. He 
lay on the sofa, passed days without eating, drank his camomile 
tea and sat in perfect darkness at night until his hour for sleep. 
Sixty people have been waiting to see him, but he took no no- 
tice of knocks, and sat, lost in trance. 
No wonder the mob believed him a murderer whom the evil 
spirit had taught to play upon one string with such wonderful 
music, when a convict in the condemned cell. After astonishing 
a world he gave his dying moments to the feeble notes of his 
violin in the moonlight, by the blue Mediterranean, with the 
breeze waving softly in the trees, as he expired broken-hearted, 40 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
to know his spell was over. Dying without the sacraments, his 
body was refused Christian burial, and it lay above ground five 
years, until the vulgar stories of ghostly violins playing about 
the coffin, impelled the son to pay large sums of money to ob- 
tain the privilege at last to bury his father in the village near 
his home, where his ashes were finally laid to rest in May, 1845. 
We will turn aside to read some passages from the career of 
Junius Brutus Booth, the most eminent actor that America ever 
produced. 
From his memoirs, as penned by his own daughter, we learn 
that he had undoubted periods of madness. To use her lan- 
guage: 
“The calamity seemed to increase in strength and frequency 
with maturer years, and sometimes assumed very singular 
phases. From childhood, we learned from our mother, the de- 
voted and unwearying nurse of him who endured these periodi- 
cal tortures of mind, to regard these seasons of abstraction with 
sad and reverent forbearance.” 
So completely did he merge his own identity into that of the 
character he assumed, that most of his fellow actors dreaded to 
face him as Richmond on the stage, in the last struggle of 
Richard, lest he should really take their lives, for frequently he 
had to be reminded that he was personating a character, and 
must allow himself to be slain. 
His salvation from utter wreck, for many years, was his love 
of the soil, the happy retirement to the work of his garden in 
the open air, away from the feverish excitement of the theatre. 
On one occasion, while on a voyage South, he spoke of the 
actor Conway, who had committed suicide by leaping into the 
sea. As the vessel neared the spot, Booth cried out that he had 
a message for Conway, and jumped into the ocean; but a boat 
was lowered at once, and he was saved. Yet the suicidal im- 
pulse was so quickly over, that he called out, when once safe in 
the boat, “I say Tom, you are a heavy man—be steady. If the 
boat upsets, we are all drowned.” 
It is well known, that in Charleston, after he had played Iago 
one night, and returned to their room, with his friend Flynn, 
who had been the Othello of the evening, that he attacked him 
fiercely with his drawn sword, crying: The Border-Land of Insanity. 
41 
“Nothing can or shall satisfy my soul, 
Till I am even with him—life for life.” 
Flynn, to save his life, grappled the fire-poker, and struck 
Booth in the face, breaking his nose. On another occasion, he 
came near sacrificing the life of the actor Eton, in the same 
play. 
He was supposed by turns a Jew, for he knew Hebrew, rever- 
enced the Kalmud, and attended the Synagogue, joining the 
worship in the Hebraic tongue. He was familiar with the 
Koran, and again he was a devout Catholic. It is related, that 
while a Catholic, he once walked from his house in Harford 
county, Maryland, to Washington, with leaden inner soles to 
his shoes, by way of penance for some sin. 
Few of his eccentricities were more remarkable than his de- 
sire to leave the stage at three hundred dollars a night for the 
post of light-house keeper at Cape Hatteras, for three hundred 
dollars a year, when thousands hung upon his lips, and money 
and fame were his everywhere. We learn that this memoran- 
dum exists, in his handwriting: 
“Spoke to Mr. Blount, Collector of Customs, about Cape Hat- 
teras light-house. He offered it to me, with the dwelling house 
and twenty acres of land, and a salary of three hundred dollars 
per annum, for keeping the light; government providing the oil 
and cotton; a quart per diem. Grapes, melons, cabbages, pota- 
toes, carrots and onions grow there; rainwater the only drink, a 
cistern on the premises for that purpose. Abundance of fish and 
wild fowl; pigs, cows and horses find good pasture. Soil too light 
for wheat or corn. The office is for life, and only taken away 
through misbehavior. Light requires trimming every night at 
12 o’clock; no taxes, firewood from the wrecks. Strawberries, 
currants and apple trees should be taken there ; also a plough, 
spades, and a chest of carpenter’s tools. Pine tables the best. 
Mr. Blount is to write me word if the office can be given me, in 
April next, from his seat in Washington, N. C.” 
It is needless to say that theatrical managers broke up the plan 
at headquarters. 
Booth permitted no animals to be killed on his place, ate no 
animal food, nor allowed it in his house, for many years. It is 
said that when a grave and respectable Quaker once pressed 42 
Tiie Border-Land of Insanity. 
dish after dish of meats upon him, at supper, on a steamboat, 
and finally offered something for which Booth had a special ab- 
horrence, he fixed his deep eyes on the Quaker, and said with 
profound earnestness: “Friend! I only indulge in one kind of 
flesh—human flesh!—that I take raw!” 
Once, in Boston, after a long scriptural argument against the 
use of animal food, and the reading of the “Ancient Mariner” 
to the Rev. Mr. Clark, he exhibited a bushel of wild pigeons on 
a sheet, which he asked to have buried in the cemetery to testify 
in a public way against man’s barbarity. Upon refusal, a day 
or two after, he did actually place them in a coffin and conveyed 
them to a lot he had purchased in another cemetery, with all 
the solemnities of a funeral. Yet, he was acting every night 
in his usual marvelous style. Finally, the actors everywhere 
grew afraid of him. Terribly in earnest on the stage, when he 
passed off he sat behind the scenes, looking sternly at the ground 
and speaking to no one. 
He would often disappear when in no manner intoxicated, but 
his family avoided questioning him, and respected the sanctity 
of his struggles and his seasons of darkness. With him certain 
colors and metals were sacred for certain days. Strange as it 
may seem to some, this world-renowned actor was a good man, 
humble and devout before his Maker, and his last words were 
Pray! Pray! Pray! 
Time warns me to pause. All these illustrious victims of 
disease, save the last, are those of children of the old world. 
There are reasons why it may not become the speaker to dwell 
upon the infirmities of our own countrymen from James Otis, 
the revolutionary patriot, to Horace Greeley, the late candidate 
for the highest position in the gift of the American people. 
Reviewing this mighty mass of human misery, we see every- 
where a degenerate ancestry, or gross physical habits, or over- 
whelming labors thrown upon a young and tender brain. Some 
fall at the first onset, others bravely resist, and manage to se- 
cure all that life can give. Yet again and again we have seen 
the immortal mind rising above the trammels of the body to 
assert its kinship with Divinity. 
The lesson is one of the greatest of the hour to us as a people. 
The war has not left us all its legacies—the next generation, The Border-Land of Insanity. 
43 
will bear its cruel stamp. Excess in all its forms, is a national 
sin; in eating and drinking, in gambling and extravagance, in 
the rush of social emulation, and the mad excitements of wealth 
and ambition. Men are dropping around us every day, with 
paralysis and apoplexy. Hundreds are yearly added to the rolls 
of the insane, whose families are ruined, their wives broken- 
hearted, their children thrown as waifs on the tossing sea of 
destiny. 
Let us take comfort that science can do so much to heal the 
wounds of the brain, and break down the barriers between the 
mind and body. The venerable Dr. Chipley utters these words 
of consolation and of hope: 
“ There is in fact a power in man to prevent or control insan- 
ity, and it fails chiefly when it has been misdirected in the 
earlier periods of life.” 
It is rarely efficient unless it has been developed and strength- 
ened by education, and hence the poor and unschooled are the 
greatest sufferers from the most terrible of all human afflictions. 
For example, the educated and the uninstructed are alike the 
subjects of illusions, but the trained mind of one will recognize 
their true character, and adopt suitable measures to correct the 
morbid condition on which they depend; while the other, unable 
to reason, will accept them as real. The illusions may be pre- 
cisely the same, yet the one subject is sane, and the other in- 
sane. The difference is in the organ of self-control. Vagaries 
intrude themselves upon all minds, but the man of self-control 
represses them, and seeks fresh impressions from without—the 
weak man yields to them, and is lost.” 
Let our children be brought up in sound and healthful habits 
of mind and body. Let us rein in the passions that would en- 
slave us. Let us not flee the wretched lunatic as one accursed 
of God, the object of curiosity or of horror, but rather enfold him 
in the arms of a charity and a sweet compassion, whose great 
Exemplar did not disdain to “ heal the sick.” 
In parting, will you pardon me that I repeat words addressed 
to your representatives, for we have seen that it is true, “No 
rank can shield, no wealth exempt from, no genius escape, no 
loveliness can charm away, no innocence avert the destroyer; 
with a firm reliance on the blessing of Providence, upon the in- 44 
The Border-Land of Insanity. 
struraents of combat placed in her hands, the State must stand 
forth protector, guardian and Savior.” 
“ Art thou a wanderer? hast thou seen 
O’erwhelming tempests drown thy bark ? 
A shipwreck’d sufferer hast thou been, 
Misfortune’s mark? 
Though long of winds and waves the sport, 
Condemn’d in wretchedness to roam, 
Live! thou shalt reach a sheltering port, 
A quiet home. 
There is a calm for those who weep! 
A rest for weary pilgrims found: 
And while the mouldering ashes sleep 
Low in the ground; 
The soul, of origin Divine, 
God’s glorious image, freed from clay, 
In Heaven’s eternal sphere shall shine, 
A star of day! 
The sun is but a spark of fire, 
A transient meteor in the sky; 
The soul, immortal as its Sire, 
Shall never die.”