He was not unwilling to trace his breaking down to excessive austerity in former years.  Once when asked for advice about corporal mortification he answered:  “Don’t go too fast.  Remember St. Bernard’s regret for having gone too far with such things in his youth.  For my part, for many years I practised frightful penances, and now I fear that much of my physical helplessness is due to that cause.”  His state was not one of utter debility, though that quickly resulted if watchfulness were relaxed, or from application to responsible duties.  But his strength never was to much to speak of, “only so, so,” to use his own expressions, which signified a very small amount of the power of exertion or endurance in the muscles and nerves.

“What about my health?” he wrote from Europe.  “There are days when I feel quite myself, and then others when I sink down to the bottom.  My condition of mind and body often perplexes me, and there is nothing left me but to abandon all into the hands of Divine Providence.  The end of it all is entirely in the dark, and were there not parallel epochs in my past life, and similar things in the lives of some others which I have read, my perplexity would be greater.”

And again, from Ragatz, in the summer of 1875: 

“My state of health is much the same.  I found last week that my pulse was bounding in a few hours from the sixties into the nineties without any apparent cause.  Yesterday I determined to consult the leading physician here.  He examined me, and, like all others, attributes everything to my nerves, resulting from impoverished blood.  I say to myself:  1st, How long will the machine keep working in this style? 2d, There will be a smash-up some day. 3d, Or perhaps I shall be able to get up more steam and run it a while longer.  Who knows?”

And in another letter from the same place: 

“Even here, freed from all [labors], it often seems to me that a good breeze, if it struck me in the right place, would drive the soul out of my body, so lightly is it connected with it, so slightly do they hold together.”

As already said, his trip to Egypt had given him a temporary relief, and this was due, so he supposed, to utter change of scene and to solitude.  When it was over he wrote as follows: 

“This trip has been in every respect much more to my benefit than my most sanguine expectations led me to hope.  It seems to me almost like an inspiration, such have been its beneficial effects to my mind and body.  In Nubia there reigned profound silence and repose, and in lower Egypt, although there is more activity and evidence of modern life, still it is quiet and tranquil.  I feel somewhat like one who has been in solitude for three or four months.”