ef of Tahiti. But the image does not
lead to evocation of related or parallel ideas.

"When, on the other hand, I take a walk over the Comburg moor, the
castle weighs upon me in all its massiveness; the recollections of the
_Memoires d'Outre-tombe_ besiege me like living pictures. I see, like
Chateaubriand himself, the family of great famished lords in their
feudal castle. With Chateaubriand I return in the twinkling of an eye to
the Niagara that we have both seen. In the fall of the waters I find the
deep and melancholy note that he himself found; and after that I think
of that dark cathedral of Dol that evidently suggested to the author his
_Genie du Christianisme_.

"In literature, things are very unequally suggestive to me. Classic
literature has only few paths outwards for me--Tacitus, Lucretius,
Juvenal, Homer, and Saint-Simon excepted. I read the other authors of
this class partly for themselves, without making a comparison. On the
other hand, the reading of Dante, Shakespeare, St. Jerome's compact
verses on the Hebrew, and Middle Age prose excites within me a whole
world of ideas, like Wagner's music, _canto-fermo_, and Beethoven.
Certain things form a link for me from one order of ideas to another.
For example, Michaelangelo and the Bible, Rembrandt and Balzac, Puvis de
Chavannes and the Merovingian narratives.

"To sum up: There are in me certain _milieux_ especially favorable to
imagination. When any circumstance brings me into one of them, it is
rare that an imaginative network does not occur; and, if one is
produced, association of ideas will perform the work. When I give myself
up to serious work, I have to mistrust myself: and in this connection I
shall surprise people when I say that in the class of ideas above
indicated the subject exciting the most ideas in me is sociology."

M......, sixty years of age, artistic temperament. Because of the
necessities of life, he has followed a profession entirely opposite to
his bent. He has given me his "confession" in the form of fragmentary
notes made day by day. Many are _moral_ remarks on the subject of his
imagination--I leave them out. I note especially the unconquerable
tendency to make up little romances and some details in regard to visual
representation, and a dislike for numbers.

"It happens that I experience sharp regret when I see the photograph of
a monument, e.g., the Pantheon, the proportions of which I have
constructed according to the descrip