with the scent of woods. He was always silent
and resigned, a living elegy, always suffering but unable to complain of
suffering. An eagle that needed the world to feed him, shut in between
four narrow, dirty walls; and thus this life became an ideal life in the
strictest meaning of the words. Filled as he was with contempt of the
almost useless studies to which we were harnessed, Louis went on his
skyward way absolutely unconscious of the things about us.

I, obeying the imitative instinct that is so strong in childhood, tired
to regulate my life in conformity with his. And Louis the more easily
infected me with the sort of torpor in which deep contemplation leaves
the body, because I was younger and more impressionable than he. Like
two lovers, we got into the habit of thinking together in a common
reverie. His intuitions had already acquired that acuteness which must
surely characterize the intellectual perceptiveness of great poets and
often bring them to the verge of madness.

"Do you ever feel," said he to me one day, "as though imagined suffering
affected you in spite of yourself? If, for instance, I think with
concentration of the effect that the blade of my penknife would have in
piercing my flesh, I feel an acute pain as if I had really cut myself;
only the blood is wanting. But the pain comes suddenly, and startles me
like a sharp noise breaking profound silence. Can an idea cause physical
pain?--What do you say to that, eh?"

When he gave utterance to such subtle reflections, we both fell
into artless meditation; we set to work to detect in ourselves the
inscrutable phenomena of the origin of thoughts, which Lambert hoped to
discover in their earliest germ, so as to describe some day the unknown
process. Then, after much discussion, often mixed up with childish
notions, a look would flash from Lambert's eager eyes; he would grasp my
hand, and a word from the depths of his soul would show the current of
his mind.

"Thinking is seeing," said he one day, carried away by some objection
raised as to the first principles of our organization. "Every human
science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by
which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all
poetry, like every work of art, proceeds from a swift vision of things."

He was a spiritualist (as opposed to materialism); but I would venture
to contradict him, using his own arguments to consider the intellect
as a p