within me; my intellect seemed about to desert me altogether. In vain I
tried to read. Nothing could fix my attention. I read and re-read the
same page; but although I understood every word as I read, I found when
I came to a pause, that there lingered in my mind no palest notion of
the idea. It was just what one experiences in attempting to read when
half-asleep.

I tried Euclid, and fared a little better with that. But having now to
initiate my boys into the mysteries of equations, I soon found that
although I could manage a very simple one, yet when I attempted one more
complex--one in which something bordering upon imagination was necessary
to find out the object for which to appoint the symbol to handle it
by--the necessary power of concentration was itself a missing factor.

But although my thoughts were thus beyond my control, my duties were not
altogether irksome to me. I remembered that they kept me near her; and
although I could not learn, I found that I could teach a little.

Perhaps it is foolish to dwell upon an individual variety of an almost
universal stage in the fever of life; but one exception to these
indications of mental paralysis I think worth mentioning.

I continued my work in the library, although it did not advance with the
same steadiness as before. One day, in listless mood, I took up a
volume, without knowing what it was, or what I sought. It opened at the
_Amoretti_ of Edmund Spenser. I was on the point of closing it again,
when a line caught my eye. I read the sonnet; read another; found I
could understand them perfectly; and that hour the poetry of the
sixteenth century, hitherto a sealed fountain, became an open well of
refreshment, and the strength that comes from sympathy. What if its