VII. Sometimes they change their career and course of study several times in succession, as though the mighty intellect could not find rest and relief in a single science.[438] Swift, in addition to his satiric poems, wrote on the manufactures of Ireland, on theology, on politics, and on the history of the reign of Queen Anne. Cardan was at the same time a mathematician, physician, theologian, and literary man. Rousseau was painter, music-master, charlatan, philosopher, botanist, and poet; and Hoffmann, magistrate, caricaturist, musician, romance-writer, and dramatist. Tasso--as did Gogol after him--attempted all varieties of poetry, epic, dramatic, and didactic, in all metres. Newton and Pascal, in moments of aberration, abandoned physics for theology. Lenau cultivated medicine, agriculture, law, poetry, and theology. VIII. These energetic and terrible intellects are the true pioneers of science; they rush forward regardless of danger, facing with eagerness the greatest difficulties--perhaps because it is these which best satisfy their morbid energy. They seize the strangest connections, the newest and most salient points; and here I may mention that originality, carried to the point of absurdity, is the principal characteristic of insane poets and artists. Ampère always sought out the most difficult problems in mathematics--the abysses--as Arago has noted. Rousseau, in the _Devin du Village_, had attempted the music of the future, afterwards tried again by another insane genius, Schumann. Swift used to say that he only felt at his ease when treating the most difficult subjects, and those most out of the line of his habitual occupations. In fact, in his _Directions to Servants_, he seems, not a theologian or a politician, but a servant himself. His _Confession of a Thief_ was believed to have been really written by a well-known criminal, so that the latter’s accomplices, thinking that they were discovered, gave themselves up to justice. In the prophecies of Bickerstaff, he assumed the character of a Catholic, and succeeded in deceiving the Roman Inquisition. Walt Whitman is the creator of a rhymeless poetry, which the Anglo-Saxons regard as the poetry of the future, and which certainly bears the imprint of strange and wild originality. Poe’s compositions (says Baudelaire, one of his greatest admirers) seem to have been produced in order to show that strangeness may enter into the elements of the beautiful; and he collected them under the title of _Arabesques and Grotesques_, because these exclude the human countenance, and his literature was _extra-human_. Here, too, we note the predilection of insane artists for arabesques, and, moreover, for arabesques which suggest the human figure.[439] Baudelaire himself created the prose poem, and carried to the highest point the adoration of artificial beauty. He was the first to find new poetic associations in the olfactory sense.[440]