I know what it is to have had to toil when the brain was throbbing, the
mind incapable of originating a thought, and the body worn and sore with
exhaustion; and I know what it is in such an hour, instead of having
recourse to those gross stimulants to which all worn men, both of the
higher and lower classes, are tempted, to take down my Sophocles or my
Plato (for Plato was a poet), my Goethe, or my Dante, Shakespeare,
Shelley, Wordsworth, or Tennyson; and I know what it is to feel the jar
of nerve gradually cease, and the darkness in which all life had robed
itself to the imagination become light, discord pass into harmony, and
physical exhaustion rise by degrees into a consciousness of power.--F.
W. ROBERTSON. _Lectures and Addresses._