Morbid nervousness.
--The morbid nervousness of the present day appears in several ways.
It brings a man sometimes to that startled state, that the sudden opening of a door, the clash of the falling
fire-irons, or any little accident, puts him in a flutter.
How nervous the late
Sir Robert Peel must have been when, a few weeks before his death, he went to the
Zoological Gardens, and when a monkey suddenly sprang upon his arm, the great and worthy man fainted!
Another phase of nervousness is, when a man is brought to that state that the least noise or cross-occurrence seems to jar through the entire nervous system — to upset him, as we say, when he cannot command his mental powers, except in perfect stillness, or in the chamber and at the writing table to which he is accustomed; when, in short, he gets fidgety, easily worried, full of whims and fancies, which must be indulged and considered, or he is quite out of sorts.
Another phase of the same morbid condition is, when a human being is oppressed with vague undefined fears that things are going wrong, that his income will not meet the demands upon it, that his child's lungs are affected, that his mental powers are leaving him — a state of feeling which shades rapidly off into positive insanity.
Indeed when matters remaining long in any of the fashions which have been described, I suppose the natural termination must be disease of the heart, or a shock of paralysis, or insanity in the form either of mania or idiocy.
Numbers of common-place people who could feel very acutely, but who could not tell what they felt, have been worried into fatal heart disease by prolonged anxiety and misery.--Every one knows how paralysis laid its hand upon
Sir Walter Scott, always great, lastly heroic.
Protracted anxiety how to make the ends meet, with a large family and an uncertain income, drove
Southey's first wife into the lunatic asylum; and there is hardly a more touching story than that of her fears and forebodings through nervous year after year.
Not less sad the end of her overwrought husband, in blank vacuity, nor the like end of
Thomas Moore.
And perhaps the saddest instance of the result of an overdriven nervous system, in recent days, was the end of that rugged, honest, wonderful genius,
Hugh Miller.--
Recreations of a Country Parson. 
