e with the word ringing in my ears."

Besides this, there was a curious little peculiarity in him that I
have never heard of in anyone else: a capacity for seeing little
waking visions with strange distinctness.

His description of this is as follows:

"I have the power, or rather something in me is able (for I can not
resist it), of suddenly producing a picture on the retina, of such
vividness as to blot out everything around me. I have it generally
when I am a little tired with exercise or brain-work or people: it is
prefaced by seeing a bright blue spot, which moves, or rather rushes,
across my field of vision, and is immediately succeeded by the
picture.

"A crumbling sandstone temple, among fields of blue flowers--an
obelisk carved with figures, in a wood--a gray indistinct marsh, with
mist rising from it, and by the edge a white bird, egret or something
similar, of dazzling whiteness--a green lane, with cows in it. I
could go on for ever enumerating them. They pass in a fraction of a
second, three or four succeeding one another. My eyes are not shut,
nor do I look different. I have always seen them. I was alarmed about
them once, and went to a doctor; but he said he could not explain
it--it was probably a nervous idiosyncrasy: and I felt all the better
for my habit having a name."

One more thing I must mention about him, which I have discovered
since his death. I must add _that I never had the least suspicion of
it in his life_.

He was the victim during this time of a depression of mind; not
constant, but from which he never felt secure. I subjoin a few
entries from his diaries.

"Very troubled and gloomy: a strange heart-sinking--a blank misgiving
without any adequate cause upon me all day. One can not help feeling
during such times--and, alas! they are becoming very familiar to
me--that some mysterious warfare may be being fought out somewhere
over one's only half-conscious soul: that some strange decision may
be pending." And again: "For the last week, my mind--though I have
reiterated again and again to myself that it is purely physical--has
steadily refused to take any view of life, to have any outlook,
except the most dismal. I am a little better to-day--well enough to
see the humour of it, though God knows it is black enough while it
lasts."

In one letter he wrote to me, I find the following words: it never
occurred to me at the time that they were the gradual fruits of his
own experience o