Before I could get through half a dozen words I meant to soothe, he had
once more bounded up, dashed the tears from his eyes, and was again
singing some wild, barbaric chant. Abstracting itself from the appeal to
its outward sense by melodies of which the language was unknown, my mind
soon grew absorbed in meditative conjectures on the singular nature, so
wayward, so impulsive, which had forced intimacy on a man grave and
practical as myself.

I was puzzled how to reconcile so passionate a childishness, so
undisciplined a want of self-control, with an experience of mankind so
extended by travel, with an education desultory and irregular indeed, but
which must, at some time or other, have been familiarized to severe
reasonings and laborious studies. In Margrave there seemed to be wanting
that mysterious something which is needed to keep our faculties, however
severally brilliant, harmoniously linked together,--as the string by
which a child mechanically binds the wildflowers it gathers, shaping them
at choice into the garland or the chain.

[1] "According to the views we have mentioned, we must ascribe life to a
gas, that is, to an aeriform body."--Liebig: "Organic Chemistry,"
Mayfair's translation, p.363.--It is perhaps not less superfluous to add
that Liebig does not support the views "according to which life must be
ascribed to a gas," than it would be to state, had Dugald Stewart been
quoted as writing, "According to the views we have mentioned the mind is
but a bundle of impressions," that Dugald Stewart was not supporting, but
opposing, the views of David Hume. The quotation is merely meant to show,
in the shortest possible compass, that there are views entertained by
speculative reasoners of our day which, according to Liebig, would lead to
the inference at which Margrave so boldly arrives. Margrave is, however,
no doubt, led to his belief by his reminiscences of Van Helmont, to whose