I tried to read all night occasionally, as Lowell told me he had sometimes done, and as a mathematical classmate of mine had done weekly, to my envy; but sleepiness and the morning chill soon checked this foolish enterprise. On one of these nights I had an experience so nearly incredible that I scarcely dare to tell it, yet it was, I believe, essentially true. Sitting up till four one morning over a volume of Lamennais, I left the mark at an unfinished page, having to return the book to the college library. A year after I happened to take the book from the library again, got up at four o'clock to read, began where I left off, and afterwards,--not till afterwards,--looking in my diary, found that I had simply skipped a precise year and gone on with the passage.
I continued to teach myself German on a preposterous plan brought forward in those days by a learned Hungarian, Dr. Charles Kraitsir, who had a theory of the alphabet, and held that by its means all the Indo-European languages could be resolved into one; so that we could pass from each to another by an effort of will, like the process of mind-healing.
