The boy prized the means of study as
only those under such circumstances know how to prize them; indeed,
far beyond their real worth; since, by excessive study, prolonged
often at the expense of sleep, he made himself insane.
All may conceive the feelings of the family when their star returned
to them again, shorn of its beams; their pride, their hard-earned
hope, sunk to a thing so hopeless, so helpless, that there could be
none so poor to do him reverence. But they loved him, and did what the
ignorance of the time permitted. There was little provision then for
the treatment of such cases, and what there was was of a kind that
they shrunk from resorting to, if it could be avoided. They kept him
at home, giving him, during the first months, the freedom of the
house; but on his making an attempt to kill his father, and confessing
afterwards that his old veneration had, as is so often the case in
these affections, reacted morbidly to its opposite, so that he never
saw a once-loved parent turn his back without thinking how he could
rush upon him and do him an injury, they felt obliged to use harsher
measures, and chained him to a post in one room of the house.
There, so restrained, without exercise or proper medicine, the fever
of insanity came upon him in its wildest form.
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