the same time I was troubled with pain in my kidneys and bowels,
accompanied with flatulency. In the morning, as I began to read, as
was my custom, my eyes instantly ached intensely, but were refreshed
after a little corporeal exercise. The candle which I looked at seemed
as if it were encircled by a rainbow. Not long after the sight of the
left part of the left eye (which I lost some years before the other)
became quite obscured, and prevented me from discerning any object
on that side. The sight in my other eye has now been gradually and
sensibly vanishing away for about three years; some months before it
had entirely perished, though I stood motionless, every thing which
I looked at seemed in motion to and fro. A stiff cloudy vapor seemed
to have settled on my forehead and temples, which usually occasions a
sort of somnolent pressure upon my eyes, and particularly from dinner
till evening. So that I often recollect what is said of the poet
Phineas in the Argonautics:

"A stupor deep his cloudy temples bound,
And when he waked he seemed as whirling round,
Or in a feeble trance he speechless lay."

I ought not to omit that, while I had any sight left, as soon as I
lay down on my bed, and turned on either side, a flood of light used
to gush from my closed eyelids. Then, as my sight became daily more
impaired, the colors became more faint, and were emitted with a
certain crackling sound; but at present every species of illumination
being, as it were, extinguished, there is diffused around me nothing
but darkness, or darkness mingled and streaked with an ashy brown. Yet
the darkness in which I am perpetually immersed seems always, both by
night and day, to approach nearer to a white than black; and when the
eye is rolling in its socket, it admits a little particle of light