supplement written in reply to the tidings with which I had wrung his
friendly and tender heart. In this, the latter part of his letter, he
suggested that if time had wrought no material change for the better, it
might be advisable to try the effect of foreign travel. Scenes entirely
new might stimulate observation, and the observation of things external
withdraw the sense from that brooding over images delusively formed
within, which characterized the kind of mental alienation I had described.
"Let any intellect create for itself a visionary world, and all reasonings
built on it are fallacious: the visionary world vanishes in proportion as
we can arouse a predominant interest in the actual."

This grand authority, who owed half his consummate skill as a practitioner
to the scope of his knowledge as a philosopher, then proceeded to give me
a hope which I had not dared of myself to form. He said:--

"I distinguish the case you so minutely detail from that insanity which
is reason lost; here it seems rather to be reason held in suspense.
Where there is hereditary predisposition, where there is organic
change of structure in the brain,--nay, where there is that kind of
insanity which takes the epithet of moral, whereby the whole
character becomes so transformed that the prime element of sound
understanding, conscience itself, is either erased or warped into the
sanction of what in a healthful state it would most disapprove,--it is
only charlatans who promise effectual cure. But here I assume that
there is no hereditary taint; here I am convinced, from my own
observation, that the nobility of the organs, all fresh as yet in the
vigour of youth, would rather submit to death than to the permanent
overthrow of their equilibrium in reason; here, where you tell me the
character preserves all its moral attributes of gentleness and purity,
and but over-indulges its own early habit of estranged contemplation;