much like simple silliness to most people, but those who have not
been bound to a wheel do not know what thoughts come into the head of
the strongest man who is extended on it. Clark sat side by side in
his gallery with other young men of rather a degraded type, and the
confinement bred in them a filthy grossness with which they tormented
him. They excited in him loathsome images, from which he could not
free himself either by day or night. He was peculiarly weak in his
inability to cast off impressions, or to get rid of mental pictures
when once formed, and his distress at being haunted by these hateful,
disgusting thoughts was pitiable. They were in fact almost more than
thoughts, they were transportations out of himself--real visions. It
would have been his salvation if he could have been a carpenter or a
bricklayer, in country air, but this could not be.

Clark had no power to think connectedly to a conclusion. When an
idea came into his head, he dwelt upon it incessantly, and no
correction of the false path upon which it set him was possible,
because he avoided society. Work over, he was so sick of people that
he went back to himself. So it came to pass that when brought into
company, what he believed and cherished was frequently found to be
open to obvious objection, and was often nothing better than nonsense
which was rudely, and as he himself was forced to admit, justly
overthrown. He ought to have been surrounded with intelligent
friends, who would have enabled him to see continually the other
side, and who would have prevented his long and useless wanderings.
Like many other persons, too, whom I have known--just in proportion
to his lack of penetrative power was his tendency to occupy himself
with difficult questions. By a cruel destiny he was impelled to
dabble in matters for which he was totally unfitted. He never could
go beyond his author a single step, and he lost himself in endless