had meditated on their counsels not occasionally but daily, persistently, for hours together, till the bounds between their minds and his disappeared, and their thoughts actually became his thoughts and their temper his temper. It is a discipline which breaks down the walls of personality and merges the individual with the over-soul. By books, he writes in his journal in 1824 at the age of twenty-one, "my memory goes back to a past immortality, and I almost realize the perfection of a spiritual intercourse which gains all the good, and lacks all the inconvenience and disgust of close society of imperfect beings. We are then likest to the image of God, for in this grateful rapidity of thought a thousand years become one day."
A mind thus stored and sensitized will respond now and then to an apparently slight stimulus with an extraordinary excitement and something in the nature of "vision" and "illumination." The young man reads in quiet solitude one of the more poetical dialogues of Plato, or he walks in flowering fields communing with his thoughts, or he lifts his head from his sick-bed at sunrise and beholds "the spotless orange light of the morning streaming up from the dark hills into the wide universe." Suddenly, to him unaccountably, there is a profound stirring of his emotional depths. A sense of sublimity fills his consciousness. His will appears to him godlike, invincible. He is elate with benign resolution. In a delighted ecstasy he feels streaming through all
