During the first few hours I seemed virtually normal.  I had none of the delusions which had previously oppressed me; nor had I yet developed any of the expansive ideas, or delusions of grandeur, which soon began to crowd in upon me.  So normal did I appear while talking to my brother that he thought I should be able to return home in a few weeks; and, needless to say, I agreed with him.  But the pendulum, as it were, had swung too far.  The human brain is too complex a mechanism to admit of any such complete readjustment in an instant.  It is said to be composed of several million cells; and, that fact granted, it seems safe to say that every day, perhaps every hour, hundreds of thousands of the cells of my brain were now being brought into a state of renewed activity.  Comparatively sane and able to recognize the important truths of life, I was yet insane as to many of its practical details.  Judgment being King of the Realm of Thought, it was not surprising that my judgment failed often to decide correctly the many questions presented to it by its abnormally communicative subjects.  At first I seemed to live a second childhood.  I did with delight many things which I had first learned to do as a child—­the more so as it had been necessary for me to learn again to eat and walk, and now to talk.  I had much lost time to make up; and for a while my sole ambition seemed to be to utter as many thousand words a day as possible.  My fellow-patients who for fourteen months had seen me walk about in silence—­a silence so profound and inexorable that I would seldom heed their friendly salutations—­were naturally surprised to see me in my new mood of unrestrained loquacity and irrepressible good humor.  In short, I had come into that abnormal condition which is known to psychiatrists as elation.

For several weeks I believe I did not sleep more than two or three hours a night.  Such was my state of elation, however, that all signs of fatigue were entirely absent and the sustained and abnormal mental and physical activity in which I then indulged has left on my memory no other than a series of very pleasant impressions.  Though based on fancy, the delights of some forms of mental disorder are real.  Few, if any, sane persons would care to test the matter at so great a price; but those familiar with the “Letters of Charles Lamb” must know that Lamb, himself, underwent treatment for mental disease.  In a letter to Coleridge, dated June 10th, 1796, he says:  “At some future time I will amuse you with an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turns my frenzy took.  I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy; for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness.  Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of Fancy till you have gone mad!  All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so!”

As for me, the very first night vast but vague humanitarian projects began joyously to shape themselves in my mind.  My garden of thoughts seemed filled with flowers which might properly be likened to the quick-blowing night-blooming cereus—­that Delusion of Grandeur of all flowering plants that thinks itself prodigal enough if it but unmask its beauty to the moon!  Few of my bold fancies, however, were of so fugitive and chaste a splendor.