d."

He was now, indeed, very near his goal, though even yet he did not
clearly see it. And once more all his active powers deserted him.
Study became impossible. His mind was drawn so strongly in upon
itself that neither work nor play, neither books nor the renewed
intercourse which at this period he sought with his old friends in
Boston and at Brook Farm, could any longer fasten his attention. He
opens his new diary with a record of the trial he has just made in
order to discover "whether in mixing with the world I should not be
somewhat influenced by their life and brought into new relations with
my studies. But it was to no purpose that I went. . . . There was no
inducement that I could imagine strong enough to keep me from
returning. Ole Bull, whom I very much wished to hear again, was to
play the next evening; and Parley Pratt, a friend whom I had not met
for a great length of time, and whom I did wish to see, was to be in
town the next day. There were many other things to keep me, but none
of them had the least effect. I could no more keep myself there than
a man could sink himself in the Dead Sea, and so I had to come home.

"I feel a strong inclination to doze and slumber, and more and more
in these slumbers the dim shadows that appear in my waking state
become clearer, and my conversation is more real and pleasant to me.
I feel a double consciousness in this state, and think, 'Now, is not
this real? I will recollect it all, what I saw and what I said'; but
it flies and is lost when I awake. . . . I call this sleeping, but
sleep it is not; for in this state I am more awake than at any other
time."

A few days later, on June 5, he notes that

"Although my meals are made of unleavened bread and figs, and my
drink is water, and I eat no more than supports my body, yet do I
feel sinfully self-indulgent."

He resolves, moreover, to trouble himself no more about the fact that
he cannot continue his studies. On this subject, and on the passivity
to which he was now compelled, he had written as explicitly as he
could to his friend Brownson, and on June 7 he received a response
which had such an immediate result upon his future that we transcribe
it entire:

"Mt. Bellingham, June 6, 1844.--My dear Isaac: I thank you for your
letter, and the frankness with which you speak of your present
interior state. You ask for my advice, but I hardly know what advice
to give. There is much in your present state to approve, a