of all from betraying it to my
father, who would have suspected my sanity ever after.

I do not mean to dwell with particularity on the details of my
experience. I have described these two cases at length, because they had
definite, clearly traceable results in my after-lot.

Shortly after this last occurrence--I think the very next day--I began to
be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from the
languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my illness,
I had not been alive before. This was the obtrusion on my mind of the
mental process going forward in first one person, and then another, with
whom I happened to be in contact: the vagrant, frivolous ideas and
emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance--Mrs. Filmore, for
example--would force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate,
ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned
insect. But this unpleasant sensibility was fitful, and left me moments
of rest, when the souls of my companions were once more shut out from me,
and I felt a relief such as silence brings to wearied nerves. I might
have believed this importunate insight to be merely a diseased activity
of the imagination, but that my prevision of incalculable words and
actions proved it to have a fixed relation to the mental process in other
minds. But this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enough
when it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, became
an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of
those who were in a close relation to me--when the rational talk, the
graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds,
which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust
asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate
frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of
puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift
thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering
a fermenting heap.

At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a handsome,
self-confident man of six-and-twenty--a thorough contrast to my fragile,
nervous, ineffectual self. I believe I was held to have a sort of half-
womanish, half-ghostly beauty; for the portrait-painters, who are thick
as weeds at Geneva, had often asked me to sit to them, and I had been the
model of a dying minstrel in a fan