he position
of a sentence in the book where he had met with it, but the frame of
mind he had been in at remote dates. Thus his was the singular privilege
of being able to retrace in memory the whole life and progress of his
mind, from the ideas he had first acquired to the last thought evolved
in it, from the most obscure to the clearest. His brain, accustomed in
early youth to the mysterious mechanism by which human faculties are
concentrated, drew from this rich treasury endless images full of life
and freshness, on which he fed his spirit during those lucid spells of
contemplation.

"Whenever I wish it," said he to me in his own language, to which a fund
of remembrance gave precocious originality, "I can draw a veil over
my eyes. Then I suddenly see within me a camera obscura, where natural
objects are reproduced in purer forms than those under which they first
appeared to my external sense."

At the age of twelve his imagination, stimulated by the perpetual
exercise of his faculties, had developed to a point which permitted him
to have such precise concepts of things which he knew only from reading
about them, that the image stamped on his mind could not have been
clearer if he had actually seen them, whether this was by a process of
analogy or that he was gifted with a sort of second sight by which he
could command all nature.

"When I read the story of the battle of Austerlitz," said he to me one
day, "I saw every incident. The roar of the cannon, the cries of the
fighting men rang in my ears, and made my inmost self quiver; I could
smell the powder; I heard the clatter of horses and the voices of men; I
looked down on the plain where armed nations were in collision, just as
if I had been on the heights of Santon. The scene was as terrifying as
a passage from the Apocalypse." On the occasions when he brought all his
powers into play, and in some degree lost consciousness of his physical
existence, and lived on only by the remarkable energy of his mental
powers, whose sphere was enormously expanded, he left space behind him,
to use his own words.

But I will not here anticipate the intellectual phases of his life.
Already, in spite of myself, I have reversed the order in which I ought
to tell the history of this man, who transferred all his activities to
thinking, as others throw all their life into action.

A strong bias drew his mind into mystical studies.

"_Abyssus abyssum_," he would say. "Our spirit is