It is quite natural that, being men of great intellect and therefore acute observers, they should at last notice their own cruel anomalies and be struck by the spectacle of the _Ego_ which obtruded itself so painfully on their notice. Men in general, but more particularly the insane, love to speak of themselves, and on this theme they even become eloquent. All the more should we expect it in those whose genius is accompanied and quickened by mania. It is thus we get those wonderful records of passion and grief, monuments of phrenopathic poetry, which reveal the great and unhappy personality of the writer. Cardan wrote, not only his autobiography, but also poems on his misfortunes, and the work _De Somniis_, entirely composed of his dreams and hallucinations. The poems of Whitman are the glorification of the _Ego_. Rousseau, in his _Confessions, Dialogues, Rêveries_, like De Musset in his _Confessions_, and Hoffmann in _Kreisler_,[444] only give a minute description of themselves and their own madness. Thus also Poe, as Baudelaire has well remarked, took as his text the exceptions of human life, the hallucination which, at first doubtful, afterwards becomes a reasoned conviction; absurdity enthroned in the region of intellect and governing it with a terrible logic; hysteria occupying the place of the will; the contradiction between the nerves and the mind carried so far that grief is driven to utter itself in laughter. Pascal, who was driven by delirium into exaggerated humility, who said that Christianity suppressed the _Ego_, has not written his autobiography; yet he, too, showed traces of his hallucinations in the celebrated Amulet, and, in his _Pensées_, subtly described himself when speaking of others. It is certain that he was alluding to himself when he wrote that “extreme genius is close to extreme folly, and men are so mad that he who should not be so would be a madman of a new kind;” and when he observed that “maladies influence our judgment and sense; and while great ones perceptibly alter them, even slight ones cannot but influence them in proportion;” and that “men of genius have their heads higher, but their feet lower than the rest of us; they are all on the same level, and stand on the same clay as ourselves, children, and brutes.” Haller, in his diary, gives detailed notes of his own religious delusions, and often confesses to having completely changed his character in the course of twenty-four hours, and being “giddy, mad, persecuted by God, and scorned and despised by men.”