accompanied with intense melancholia; and he had laughed himself out of
bed, and out of his melancholy. "Don Quixote" was, he said, the only
book which he had ever read in solitude--that is, read to himself--which
had compelled him to laugh aloud. Works of science, particularly
scientific works in the domain of physics, he delighted in. His
imagination was of a most charming character. It was at that time in my
life almost a passion with me to analyze human nature--to theorize over
the motives and the results of human action; over the probable causes of
known or assumed effects, and the reverse--in short, I thought myself a
philosopher. I have never met another person whom it so much interested
me to study as it did this young American. But after ample opportunity
to know him, even now as I sit writing more than twenty years later, and
I think of the pleasure of that temporary friendship in far-away
Illinois, I am puzzled about many things concerning Doctor Bainbridge.
He certainly possessed a scientific mind. He himself said that he had no
very great love for written poetry: had he a poetic mind? He loved the
beautiful in life: he loved symmetry in form, he loved harmony in color,
he loved good music. And yet, though he had read the English-writing
poets, he seemed to care less for their work than for anything else in
literature. The thought of this inconsistency has perplexed me whenever
I have thought of it through all these years. As I have intimated, he
was charmed by the beautiful, and by every known expression of beauty;
but for the strictly metrical in language-expression, he evinced almost
a distaste. I have often thought that he had, through some peculiar
circumstance in his earlier life, acquired a suggestive dislike to the
very form of verse. To this peculiarity there was, however, exception,
to which I am about to allude.

By the time we had smoked out a cigar apiece, we were exchanging views
and comments on such writers, English and American, as came to mind. One