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