CHAPTER XXIII.

The hardest time in the school of life.

The period which now followed was the most terrible of my whole life.  Even the faithful love that surrounded me could do little to relieve it.

Medicines did not avail, and I had not yet found the arcanum which afterwards so greatly benefitted my suffering soul.

The props which my mother and Middendorf had bestowed upon me when a boy had fallen; and the feeling of convalescence, which gives the invalid’s life a sense of bliss the healthy person rarely knows, could not aid me, for the disease increased with wonderful speed.

When autumn came I was so much worse that Geheimrath von Ammon, a learned and experienced physician, recalled his advice that my mother and I should spend the winter in the south.  The journey would have been fatal.  The correctness of his judgment was proved by the short trip to Berlin which I took with my mother, aided by my brother Martin, who was then a physician studying with the famous clinical doctor Schonlein.  It was attended with cruel suffering and the most injurious results, but it was necessary for me to return to my comfortable winter quarters.  Our old friend and family physician, who had come to Hosterwitz in September to visit me, wished to have me near him, and in those days there was probably no one who deserved more confidence; for Heinrich Moritz Romberg was considered the most distinguished pathologist in nervous diseases in Germany, and his works on his own specialty are still valued.

In what a condition I entered the home which I had left so strong and full of youthful vigour!  And Berlin did not receive me kindly; for the first months I spent there brought days of suffering with fever in the afternoon, and nights whose condition was no less torturing than pain.

But our physician had been present at my birth, he was my godfather, and as kind as if I were his son.  He did everything in his power to relieve me, but the remedies he used were not much easier to bear than many a torturing disease.  And hardest of all, I was ordered to keep perfectly still in bed.  What a prospect!  But when I had once resolved to follow the doctor’s advice, I controlled with the utmost care every movement of my body.  I, who had so often wished to fly, lay like my own corpse.  I did not move, for I did not want to die, and intended to use every means in my power to defer the end.  Death, which after the haemorrhage had appeared as the beautiful winged boy who is so easily mistaken for the god of love—­Death, who had incited me to write saucy, defiant verses about him, now confronted me as a hollow-eyed, hideous skeleton.

In the guise of the most appalling figure among the apocalyptic riders of Cornelius, who had used me when a child for the model of a laughing angel, he seemed to be stretching his hand toward me from his emaciated steed.  The poppy leaf was not to flutter toward the sky, but to wither in the dust.