in ideal vision as to lose the consciousness of surrounding objects or occurrences; and when that rapt condition is past, the sane genius discriminates clearly between what has been given in this parenthetic state of excitement, and what he has known, and may count on, in the ordinary world of experience.  Dante seems to have expressed these conditions perfectly in that passage of the Purgatorio where, after a triple vision which has made him forget his surroundings, he says—­

  “Quando l’anima mia torno di fuori
    Alle cose che son fuor di lei vere,
    Io riconobbi i miei non falsi errori.”—­(c xv)

He distinguishes the ideal truth of his entranced vision from the series of external facts to which his consciousness had returned.  Isaiah gives us the date of his vision in the Temple—­“the year that King Uzziah died”—­and if afterwards the mighty-winged seraphim were present with him as he trod the street, he doubtless knew them for images of memory, and did not cry “Look!” to the passers-by.

Certainly the seer, whether prophet, philosopher, scientific discoverer, or poet, may happen to be rather mad:  his powers may have been used up, like Don Quixote’s, in their visionary or theoretic constructions, so that the reports of common-sense fail to affect him, or the continuous strain of excitement may have robbed his mind of its elasticity.  It is hard for our frail mortality to carry the burthen of greatness with steady gait and full alacrity of perception.  But he is the strongest seer who can support the stress of creative energy and yet keep that sanity of expectation which consists in distinguishing, as Dante does, between the cose che son vere outside the individual mind, and the non falsi errori which are the revelations of true imaginative power.

XIV.

THE TOO READY WRITER

One who talks too much, hindering the rest of the company from taking their turn, and apparently seeing no reason why they should not rather desire to know his opinion or experience in relation to all subjects, or at least to renounce the discussion of any topic where he can make no figure, has never been praised for this industrious monopoly of work which others would willingly have shared in.  However various and brilliant his talk may be, we suspect him of impoverishing us by excluding the contributions of other minds, which attract our curiosity the more because he has shut them up in silence.  Besides, we get tired of a “manner” in conversation as in painting, when one theme after another is treated with the same lines and touches.  I begin with a liking for an estimable master, but by the time he has stretched his interpretation of the world unbrokenly along a palatial gallery, I have had what the cautious Scotch mind would call “enough” of him.  There is monotony and narrowness already to spare in my own identity; what comes to me from without should