orks that I have ventured have been suggested by the immediate
examination of the points to which they referred. I add but a few words
of more general description.

In person he was below the middle height, slenderly but compactly formed,
and in his better moments he had in an eminent degree that air of
gentlemanliness which men of a lower order seldom succeed in acquiring.

His conversation was at times almost supramortal in its eloquence. His
voice was modulated with astonishing skill, and his large and variably
expressive eyes looked repose or shot fiery tumult into theirs who
listened, while his own face glowed, or was changeless in pallor, as his
imagination quickened his blood or drew it back frozen to his heart. His
imagery was from the worlds which no mortals can see but with the vision
of genius. Suddenly starting from a proposition, exactly and sharply
defined, in terms of utmost simplicity and clearness, he rejected the
forms of customary logic, and by a crystalline process of accretion,
built up his ocular demonstrations in forms of gloomiest and ghastliest
grandeur, or in those of the most airy and delicious beauty--so minutely
and distinctly, yet so rapidly, that the attention which was yielded to
him was chained till it stood among his wonderful creations--till he
himself dissolved the spell, and brought his hearers back to common and
base existence, by vulgar fancies or exhibitions of the ignoblest
passion.

He was at all times a dreamer--dwelling in ideal realms--in heaven or
hell--peopled with the creatures and the accidents of his brain. He
walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in
indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayer, (never for
himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned,
but) for their happiness who at the moment were objects of his
idolatry;--or, with his glances introverted to a heart gnawed with
anguish, and with a face shrouded in gloom, he would brave the wildest
storms; and all night, with drenched garments and arms beating the winds
and rains, would speak as if to spirits that at such times only could be
evoked by him from the Aidenn, close by whose portals his disturbed soul
sought to forget the ills to which his constitution subjected him--close
by the Aidenn which were those he loved--the Aidenn which he might never
see, but in fitful glimpses, as its gates opened to receive the less
fiery and more happy natures