"I have been a busy worker with the brain all my life, and have enjoyed very unusual health. I am now fifty-three, and have not been confined to the house by illness since I was seventeen, except for a short time during the war, when suffering from the results of a wound. This favourable result I attribute to (1) a good constitution—and an elastic temperament; (2) simple tastes, disinclining me to stimulants and narcotics, such as tea, coffee, wine, spirits, and tobacco; (3) a love of athletic exercises; (4) a life-long habit of writing by daylight only; (5) the use of homoeopathic medicines in the early stages of slight ailments. I have never been a special devotee of health, I think, but have followed out my natural tastes; and have certainly enjoyed physical life very much. It may be well to add that, though, as I said, my constitution was good and my frame always large, I had yet an unusual number of children's diseases, and have often been told that my life was several times preserved, in infancy, against all expectation, by the unwearied care and devotion of my mother. This may encourage some anxious parents."
Nov. 11, 1877. Hygiene of the Brain, N.Y., 1878.
WILLIAM HOWITT.
I have read with very great pleasure the letter of Mr. Bryant…. Let me observe that while the modes of my own life and those of Mr. Bryant very much accord, in a few particulars they differ, as, I suppose, must be the case in almost any two individuals. Mr. Bryant never takes coffee or tea. I regularly take both, find the greatest refreshment in both, and never experienced any deleterious effects from either, except in one instance, when, by mistake, I took a cup of tea strong enough for ten men. On the contrary, tea is to me a wonderful refresher and reviver. After long-continued exertion, as in the great pedestrian journeys that I formerly made, tea would always, in a manner almost miraculous, banish all my fatigue, and diffuse through my whole frame comfort and exhilaration, without any subsequent evil effect.
I am quite well aware that this is not the experience of many others, my wife among the number, on whose nervous system tea acts mischievously, producing inordinate wakefulness, and its continued use, indigestion. But this is one of the things that people should learn, and act upon, namely, to take such things as suit them, and avoid such as do not. It is said that Mithridates could live and flourish on poisons, and if it be true that tea or coffee is a poison, so do most of us. William Hutton, the shrewd and humorous author of the histories of Birmingham and Derby, and also of a life of himself, scarcely inferior to that of Franklin in lessons of life-wisdom, said that he had been told that coffee was a slow poison, and, he added, that he had found it very slow, for he had drunk it more than sixty years without any ill effect My experience of it has been the same.
Mr. Bryant also has recourse to the use of dumb-bells, and other gymnastic appliances. For my part, I find no artificial practices necessary for the maintenance of health and a vigorous circulation of the blood. My only gymnastics have been those of Nature—walking, riding, working in field and garden, bathing, swimming, etc. In some of those practices, or in the amount of their use, Nature, in my later years, has dictated an abatement. In Mr. Bryant's abhorrence of tobacco, I fully sympathize. That is a poisoner, a stupefier, a traitor to the nervous system, and, consequently, to energy and the spirit of enterprise, which I renounced once and for ever before I reached my twentieth year. The main causes of the vigor of my constitution and the retention of sound health, comfort, and activity to within three years of eighty, I shall point out as I proceed. First and foremost, it was my good fortune to derive my existence from parents descended on both sides from a vigorous stock, and of great longevity. I remember my great-grandmother, an old lady of nearly ninety; my grandmother of nearly as great an age. My mother lived to eighty-five, and my father to the same age. They were both of them temperate in their habits, living a fresh and healthy country life, and in enjoyment of that tranquillity of mind which is conferred by a spirit of genuine piety, and which confers, in return, health and strength.
The great destroyers of life are not labor and exertion, either physical or intellectual, but care, misery, crime, and dissipation. My wife derived from her parentage similar advantages, and all the habits of our lives, both before and since our marriage, have been of a similar character. My boyhood and youth were, for the most part, spent in the country; and all country objects, sports, and labors, horse-racing and hunting excepted, have had a never-failing charm for me. As a boy, I ranged the country far and wide in curious quest and study of all the wild creatures of the woods and fields, in great delight in birds and their nests, climbing the loftiest trees, rocks and buildings in pursuit of them. In fact, the life described in the "Boy's Country Book," was my own life. No hours were too early for me, and in the bright, sunny fields in the early mornings, amid dews and odour of flowers, I breathed that pure air which gave a life-long tone to my lungs that I still reap the benefit of. All those daily habits of climbing, running, and working developed my frame to perfection, and gave a vigor to nerve and muscle that have stood well the wear and tear of existence. My brain was not dwarfed by excessive study in early boyhood, as is too much the case with children of to-day. Nature says, as plainly as she can speak, that the infancy of all creatures is sacred to play, to physical action, and the joyousness of mind that give life to every organ of the system. Lambs, kittens, kids, foals, even young pigs and donkeys, all teach the great lesson of Nature, that to have a body healthy and strong, the prompt and efficient vehicle of the mind, we must not infringe on her ordinations by our study and cramping sedentariness in life's tender years. We must not throw away or misappropriate her forces destined to the corporeal architecture of man, by tasks that belong properly to an after-time. There is no mistake so fatal to the proper development of man and woman, as to pile on the immature brain, and on the yet unfinished fabric of the human body, a weight of premature and, therefore, unnatural study. In most of those cases where Nature has intended to produce a first-class intellect, she has guarded her embryo genius by a stubborn slowness of development. Moderate study and plenty of play and exercise in early youth are the true requisites for a noble growth of intellectual powers in man, and for its continuance to old age.
My youth, as my boyhood, was spent in the country, and in the active exercise of its sports and labors. I was fond of shooting, fishing, riding, and walking, often making long expeditions on foot for botanical or other purposes. Bathing and swimming I continued each year till the frost was in the ground and the ice fringed the banks of the river. As my father farmed his own land, I delighted in all the occupations of the field, mowing and reaping with the men through the harvest, looking after sheep and lambs, and finding never-ceasing pleasure in the cultivation of the garden.
When our literary engagements drew us to London, we carefully avoided living in the great Babel, but took up our residence in one of its healthy suburbs, and, on the introduction of railways, removed to what was actual country. A very little time showed us the exhausting and unwholesome nature of city life. Late hours, heavy dinners, the indulgence of what are called jovial hours, and crowded parties, would soon have sent us whither they have sent so many of our literary contemporaries, long, long ago. After an evening spent in one of the crowded parties of London, I have always found myself literally poisoned. My whole nervous system has been distressed and vitiated. I have been miserable and incapable the next day of intellectual labor. Nor is there any mystery about this matter. To pass some four or five hours in a town, itself badly ventilated, amid a throng of people just come from dinner, loaded with a medley of viands, and reeking with the fumes of hot wines—no few of them, probably, of very moral habits, was simply undergoing a process of asphyxia. The air was speedily decomposed by so many lungs. Its ozone and oxygen were rapidly absorbed, and in return the atmosphere was loaded with carbonic acid, carbon, nitrogen, and other effluvia, from the lungs and pores of the dense and heated company; this mischievous matter being much increased from the products of the combustion of numerous lamps, candles, and gas-jets.
The same effect was uniformly produced on me by evenings passed in theatres, or crowded concert or lecture rooms. These facts are now well understood by those who have studied the causes of health and disease in modern society; and I am assured by medical men that no source of consumption is so great as that occasioned by the breathing of these lethal atmospheres of fashionable parties, fashionable theatres, and concert and lecture halls; and then returning home at midnight by an abrupt plunge from their heat into damp and cold. People have said to me, "Oh! it is merely the effect of the unusual late hour that you have felt!" But, though nite hours, either in writing or society, have not been my habit, when circumstances of literary pressure have compelled me occasionally to work late, I have never felt any such effects. I could rise the next day a little later, perfectly refreshed and full of spirit for my work.