He gave himself no rest, either of mind or body; and "to die working" was the fate he envied.

His mind would not give in, but his poor body was forced to yield, and a severe attack of haemorrhage--bleeding from both lungs and stomach [1614]--compelled him to relax in his labours.

"For a month, or some forty days," he wrote--"a dreadful Lent--the mind has blown geographically from 'Araby the blest,' but thermometrically from Iceland the accursed.

I have been made a prisoner of war, hit by an icicle in the lungs, and have shivered and burned alternately for a large portion of the last month, and spat blood till I grew pale with coughing.

Now I am better, and to-morrow I give my concluding lecture [16on Technology], thankful that I have contrived, notwithstanding all my troubles, to carry on without missing a lecture to the last day of the Faculty of Arts, to which I belong." [1615] How long was it to last?
He himself began to wonder, for he had long felt his life as if ebbing away.