“If you be pleased, retire into my cell
   And there repose:  a turn or two I’ll walk,
   To still my beating mind.”

When it has got quiet I may take up the New Portfolio again, and consider whether it is worth while to open it consider whether it is worth while to open it.

PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS

By Oliver Wendell Holmes

Contents: 
     Bread and the newspaper
     my hunt after “The captain”
     The inevitable trial
     cinders from ashes
     the pulpit and the pew

BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER.

(September, 1861.)

This is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman populace.  It is our ultimatum, as that was theirs.  They must have something to eat, and the circus-shows to look at.  We must have something to eat, and the papers to read.

Everything else we can give up.  If we are rich, we can lay down our carriages, stay away from Newport or Saratoga, and adjourn the trip to Europe sine die.  If we live in a small way, there are at least new dresses and bonnets and every-day luxuries which we can dispense with.  If the young Zouave of the family looks smart in his new uniform, its respectable head is content, though he himself grow seedy as a caraway-umbel late in the season.  He will cheerfully calm the perturbed nap of his old beaver by patient brushing in place of buying a new one, if only the Lieutenant’s jaunty cap is what it should be.  We all take a pride in sharing the epidemic economy of the time.  Only bread and the newspaper we must have, whatever else we do without.

How this war is simplifying our mode of being!  We live on our emotions, as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished by his fever.  Our ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and what would have been intellectual luxuries at other times, are now absolutely repulsive.

All this change in our manner of existence implies that we have experienced some very profound impression, which will sooner or later betray itself in permanent effects on the minds and bodies of many among us.  We cannot forget Corvisart’s observation of the frequency with which diseases of the heart were noticed as the consequence of the terrible emotions produced by the scenes of the great French Revolution.  Laennec tells the story of a convent, of which he was the medical director, where all the nuns were subjected to the severest penances and schooled in the most painful doctrines.  They all became consumptive soon after their entrance, so that, in the course of his ten years’ attendance, all the inmates died out two or three times, and were replaced by new ones.  He does not hesitate to attribute the disease from which they suffered to those depressing moral influences to which they were subjected.