There is, in the second place, a very common form of insanity, called the Delirium of Persecution. The sufferer imagines that everybody he passes notices him, suspects him of something, or even intends him some harm. Dr. Hammond speaks of a patient of this class “who was sure that all the clergymen had entered into a conspiracy to ‘pray him into hell’! He went to the churches to hear what they had to say, and discovered adroit allusions to himself, and hidden invocations to God for his eternal damnation, in the most harmless and platitudinous expressions. He wrote letters to various pastors of churches, denouncing them for their uncharitable conduct toward him, and threatening them with bodily damage if they persisted in their efforts to secure the destruction of his soul.” “Quand nous aimons,” says Pascal, “nous nous imaginons que tout le monde s’en aperçoit”—when we are in love we imagine that everybody perceives it. The lover feels so awkward and embarrassed that he thinks every one about him must discover his secret; and this constant apprehension doubles his awkwardness, and in most cases does lead to his detection. And the jealous lover to whom “trifles light as air” are confirmations of infidelity, who sees dangerous rivalry in the most superficial attentions, and inconstancy in the most harmless smile she bestows on another—how does he differ from the man who thought the clergy were trying to pray him into hell, except that in the one case the disordered imagination is more easily restored to its normal functions than in the other? Thirdly, the lunatic and the lover, in their melancholy stages, have a common fondness for Solitude. For days and weeks a patient will sit motionless, indifferent to everybody and everything in the world except the one idea that has fixed on his brain like a leech, and is sucking its life-blood. Nothing, says an observer, is so noticeable on visiting an asylum where the patients are allowed some liberty, as the way in which each one seeks a solitary place regardless of his fellows. Are not, in the same way— “Fountain-heads and pathless groves Places which pale passion loves?”—FLETCHER. But what madman in his wildest flights ever conceived anything quite so sublimely solitary as the flight which Burns projected for himself and Clarinda (in lovers’ arithmetic twice one are one) in the following epistle: "Imagine ... that we were set free from the laws of gravitation which bind us to this globe, and could at pleasure fly, without inconvenience, through all the yet unconjectured bounds of creation, what a life of bliss would we lead, in our mutual pursuit of virtue and knowledge, and our mutual enjoyment of love and friendship!