Besides this, there was a curious little peculiarity in him that I have never heard of in anyone else: a capacity for seeing little waking visions with strange distinctness.
His description of this is as follows:
"I have the power, or rather something in me is able (for I can not resist it), of suddenly producing a picture on the retina, of such vividness as to blot out everything around me. I have it generally when I am a little tired with exercise or brain-work or people: it is prefaced by seeing a bright blue spot, which moves, or rather rushes, across my field of vision, and is immediately succeeded by the picture.
"A crumbling sandstone temple, among fields of blue flowers—an obelisk carved with figures, in a wood—a gray indistinct marsh, with mist rising from it, and by the edge a white bird, egret or something similar, of dazzling whiteness—a green lane, with cows in it. I could go on for ever enumerating them. They pass in a fraction of a second, three or four succeeding one another. My eyes are not shut, nor do I look different. I have always seen them. I was alarmed about them once, and went to a doctor; but he said he could not explain it—it was probably a nervous idiosyncrasy: and I felt all the better for my habit having a name."
One more thing I must mention about him, which I have discovered since his death. I must add that I never had the least suspicion of it in his life.
He was the victim during this time of a depression of mind; not constant, but from which he never felt secure. I subjoin a few entries from his diaries.
"Very troubled and gloomy: a strange heart-sinking—a blank misgiving without any adequate cause upon me all day. One can not help feeling during such times—and, alas! they are becoming very familiar to me—that some mysterious warfare may be being fought out somewhere over one's only half-conscious soul: that some strange decision may be pending." And again: "For the last week, my mind—though I have reiterated again and again to myself that it is purely physical—has steadily refused to take any view of life, to have any outlook, except the most dismal. I am a little better to-day—well enough to see the humour of it, though God knows it is black enough while it lasts."
In one letter he wrote to me, I find the following words: it never occurred to me at the time that they were the gradual fruits of his own experience on the subject:
"Physical and mental depression is a most fearful enemy. Other things give you trouble at intervals—toothache, headache, etc., are all spasmodic afflictions, and, moreover, can be much mitigated by circumstances. But with depression it is not so: it poisons any cup—it turns all the cheerful little daily duties of life into miseries, unutterable burdens; death is the only future event which you can contemplate with satisfaction. It admits of no comfort: the whispered suggestion of the mind, 'You will be better soon,' falls on deaf ears. No physical suffering that I have ever felt, and I have not been without my share, is in the least comparable to it; the agony of foreboding remorse and gloom with which it involves past, present, and future—there is nothing like it. It is the valley of the Shadow of Death.
"But when one first realizes how purely physical it is, it is an era. I endured it for two years first: now I am prepared. I may even say that though all sense of enjoyment dies under it, my friends, the company I am in, generally suspect nothing."