e it lasted I had
many hours of pure happiness. Do not believe, Coleridge, that you
have tasted the grandeur and all the transport of fancy if you have
not been insane. Everything seems to me now insipid in comparison."
Quoted by A. Barine, _Nevroses_, p. 326.

[154] There has often been cited the instance of certain maniacs at
Charenton, who, during the Franco-Prussian War, despite the stories
that were told them, the papers that they read, and the shells
bursting under the walls of the asylum, maintained that the war was
only imagined, and that all was only a contrivance of their
persecutors.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

THE VARIOUS FORMS OF INSPIRATION[155]

Among the descriptions of the inspired state found in various authors, I
select only three, which are brief and have each a special character.

I. Mystic inspiration, in a passive form, in Jacob Boehme (_Aurora_): "I
declare before God that I do not myself know how the thing arises within
me, without the participation of my will. I do not even know that which
I must write. If I write, it is because the Spirit moves me and
communicates to me a great, wonderful knowledge. Often I do not even
know whether I dwell in spirit in this present world and whether it is I
myself that have the fortune to possess a certain and solid knowledge."

II. Feverish and painful inspiration in Alfred de Musset: "Invention
annoys me and makes me tremble. Execution, always too slow for my wish,
makes my heart beat awfully, and weeping, and keeping myself from crying
aloud, I am delivered of an idea that is intoxicating me, but of which
I am mortally ashamed and disgusted next morning. If I change it, it is
worse, it deserts me--it is much better to forget it and wait for
another; but this other comes to me so confused and misshapen that my
poor being cannot contain it. It presses and tortures me, until it has
taken realizable proportions, when comes the other pain, of bringing
forth, a truly physical suffering that I cannot define. And that is how
my life is spent when I let myself be dominated by this artistic monster
in me. It is much better, then, that I should live as I have imagined
living, that I go to all kinds of excess, and that I kill this
never-dying worm that people like me modestly term their inspiration,
but which I call, plainly, my weakness."[156]

III. The poet Grillparzer[157] analyzes the condition, thus:

"Inspiration, properly so called, is the