which two thoughts are
apprehended to be related to each other. If any one desires to know
how unsatisfactorily the popular philosophy employs itself upon this
great question, they need only impartially reflect upon the manner in
which thoughts develop themselves in their minds. It is infinitely
improbable that the cause of mind, that is, of existence, is similar
to mind.

_Shelley._

WALKING STEWART

Mr. Stewart the traveller, commonly called "Walking Stewart," was a
man of very extraordinary genius. He has generally been treated by
those who have spoken of him in print as a madman. But this is a
mistake; and must have been founded chiefly on the titles of his
books. He was a man of fervid mind and of sublime aspirations; but he
was no madman; or, if he was, then I say that it is so far desirable
to be a madman. In 1798 or 1799, when I must have been about thirteen
years old, Walking Stewart was in Bath--where my family at that time
resided. He frequented the pump-room, and I believe all public
places--walking up and down, and dispersing his philosophic opinions
to the right and the left, like a Grecian philosopher. The first time
I saw him was at a concert in the Upper Rooms; he was pointed out to
me by one of my party as a very eccentric man who had walked over the
habitable globe. I remember that Madame Mara was at that moment
singing; and Walking Stewart, who was a true lover of music (as I
afterwards came to know), was hanging upon her notes like a bee upon a
jessamine flower. His countenance was striking, and expressed the
union of benignity with philosophic habits of thought. In such health
had his pedestrian exercises preserved him, connected with his
abstemious mode of living, that though he must at that time have been
considerably above forty, he did not look older than twenty-eight; at
least the face which remained upon my recollection for some years was
that of a young man. Nearly ten years afterwards I became acquainted
with him. During the interval I had picked up one of his works in
Bristol,--viz. his _Travels to discover the Source of Moral Motion_,
the second volume of which is entitled _The Apocalypse of Nature_. I
had been greatly impressed by the sound and original views which in
the first volume he had taken of the national characters throughout
Europe. In particular he was the first, and so far as I know the only
writer who had noticed the profound error of ascribing a phlegmatic