Although, too, the powers of my mind were confused and distorted, yet I was—strange to say!—well aware of such confusion and distortion. I could, with unerring promptitude determine at will in what particulars my sensations were correct—and in what particulars I wandered from the path. I could even feel with accuracy how far—to what very point, such wanderings had misguided me, but still without the power of correcting my deviations. I took besides, at the same time, a wild delight in analyzing my conceptions.1
1 The general reader will I dare say recognize, in these sensations of Mr. Lacko'breath, much of the absurd metaphysicianism of the redoubted Schelling.
Memory, which, of all other faculties, should have first taken its departure, seemed on the contrary to have been endowed with quadrupled power. Each incident of my past life flitted before me like a shadow. There was not a brick in the building where I was born—not a dog-leaf in the primer I had thumbed over when a child—not a tree in the forest where I hunted when a boy—not a street in the cities I had traversed when a man—that I did not at that time most palpably behold. I could repeat to myself entire lines, passages, names, acts, chapters, books, from the studies of my earlier days; and while, I dare say, the crowd around me were blind with horror, or aghast with awe, I was alternately with Æschylus, a demi-god, or with Aristophanes, a frog.
* * * * *
A dreamy delight now took hold upon my spirit, and I imagined that I had been eating opium, or feasting upon the Hashish of the old Assassins. But glimpses of pure, unadulterated reason—during which I was still buoyed up by the hope of finally escaping that death which hovered, like a vulture above me—were still caught occasionally by my soul.
By some unusual pressure of the rope against my face, a portion of the cap was chafed away, and I found to my astonishment that my powers of vision were not altogether destroyed. A sea of waving heads rolled around me. In the intensity of my delight I eyed them with feelings of the deepest commiseration, and blessed, as I looked upon the haggard assembly, the superior benignity of my proper stars.
I now reasoned, rapidly I believe—profoundly I am sure—upon principles of common law—propriety of that law especially, for which I hung—absurdities in political economy which till then I had never been able to acknowledge—dogmas in the old Aristotelians now generally denied, but not the less intrinsically true—detestable school formulæ in Bourdon, in Garnier, in Lacroix—synonymes in Crabbe—lunar-lunatic theories in St. Pierre—falsities in the Pelham novels—beauties in Vivian Grey—more than beauties in Vivian Grey—profundity in Vivian Grey—genius in Vivian Grey—every thing in Vivian Grey.
Then came, like a flood, Coleridge, Kant, Fitche, and Pantheism—then like a deluge, the Academie, Pergola, La Scala, San Carlo, Paul, Albert, Noblet, Ronzi Vestris, Fanny Bias, and Taglioni.
* * * * *
A rapid change was now taking place in my sensations. The last shadows of connection flitted away from my meditations. A storm—a tempest of ideas, vast, novel, and soul-stirring, bore my spirit like a feather afar off. Confusion crowded upon confusion like a wave upon a wave. In a very short time Schelling himself would have been satisfied with my entire loss of self-identity. The crowd became a mass of mere abstraction.