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marked phases.

Under the impulsion, from his earliest years, of a precocious activity,
due, no doubt, to some malady--or to some special perfection--of
organism, his powers were concentrated on the functions of the inner
senses and a superabundant flow of nerve-fluid. As a man of ideas, he
craved to satisfy the thirst of his brain, to assimilate every idea.
Hence his reading; and from his reading, the reflections that gave
him the power of reducing things to their simplest expression, and of
absorbing them to study them in their essence. Thus, the advantages of
this splendid stage, acquired by other men only after long study, were
achieved by Lambert during his bodily childhood: a happy childhood,
colored by the studious joys of a born poet.

The point which most thinkers reach at last was to him the
starting-point, whence his brain was to set out one day in search of
new worlds of knowledge. Though as yet he knew it not, he had made for
himself the most exacting life possible, and the most insatiably greedy.
Merely to live, was he not compelled to be perpetually casting nutriment
into the gulf he had opened in himself? Like some beings who dwell in
the grosser world, might not he die of inanition for want of feeding
abnormal and disappointed cravings? Was not this a sort of debauchery of
the intellect which might lead to spontaneous combustion, like that of
bodies saturated with alcohol?

I had seen nothing of this first phase of his brain-development; it
is only now, at a later day, that I can thus give an account of its
prodigious fruit and results. Lambert was now thirteen.

I was so fortunate as to witness the first stage of the second period.
Lambert was cast into all the miseries of school-life--and that,
perhaps, was his salvation--it absorbed the superabundance of his
thoughts. After passing from concrete ideas to their purest expression,
from words to their ideal import, and from that import to principles,
after reducing everything to the abstract, to enable him to live he
yearned for yet other intellectual creations. Quelled by the woes of
school and the critical development of his physical constitution, he
became thoughtful, dreamed of feeling, and caught a glimpse of new
sciences--positively masses of ideas. Checked in his career, and not
yet strong enough to contemplate the higher spheres, he contemplated his
inmost self. I then perceived in him the struggle of the Mind reacting
on itself, and t