Carlyle, Heine, and Keats.
Thomas Carlyle was a chronic dyspeptic, and suffered, all his life, the torments which only those unfortunates, who are victims of this disease, can comprehend. The bitterness of some of his writings which were published after his death may surely be excused when this is considered, for the chronic dyspeptic is generally understood to develop, in spite of himself, a gloomy view of life.
Heinrich Heine, the great German lyric poet, was the victim, during the last twelve years of his life, of relentless disease. He bore his dreadful sufferings so patiently that he appears in a nobler light than ever before during his life. His hearing was bad, his sight was dim, and his legs were paralyzed, yet he wrote some of his most wonderful songs during the long watches of sleepless nights, lying on his “mattress-grave.” He described his condition as “a grave without rest, death without the privileges of the departed,” yet he was never so many-sided as during this period. He produced humorous pieces, political songs, and the tenderest poems. He kept at his work as long as he could hear and speak, his last words being “paper and pencil.”
John Keats, while on a tour of the English Lakes, contracted a throat trouble which developed into consumption. He continued to write, though he failed rapidly in health, and his last volume contains some of his best poems.