I now reasoned, rapidly I believe--profoundly I am sure--upon principles of common law--propriety of that law especially, for which I hung--absurdities in political economy which till then I had never been able to acknowledge--dogmas in the old Aristotelians now generally denied, but not the less intrinsically true--detestable school formulæ in Bourdon, in Garnier, in Lacroix--synonymes in Crabbe--lunar-lunatic theories in St. Pierre--falsities in the Pelham novels--beauties in Vivian Grey--more than beauties in Vivian Grey--profundity in Vivian Grey--genius in Vivian Grey--every thing in Vivian Grey. Then came, like a flood, Coleridge, Kant, Fitche, and Pantheism--then like a deluge, the Academie, Pergola, La Scala, San Carlo, Paul, Albert, Noblet, Ronzi Vestris, Fanny Bias, and Taglioni. * * * * * A rapid change was now taking place in my sensations. The last shadows of connection flitted away from my meditations. A storm--a tempest of ideas, vast, novel, and soul-stirring, bore my spirit like a feather afar off. Confusion crowded upon confusion like a wave upon a wave. In a very short time Schelling himself would have been satisfied with my entire loss of self-identity. The crowd became a mass of mere abstraction. About this period I became aware of a heavy fall and shock--but, although the concussion jarred throughout my frame, I had not the slightest idea of its having been sustained in my own proper person; and thought of it as of an incident peculiar to some other existence--an idiosyncrasy belonging to some other Ens. It was at this moment--as I afterwards discovered--that having been suspended for the full term of execution, it was thought proper to remove my body from the gallows--this, the more especially as the real culprit had now been retaken and recognized. Much sympathy was now exercised in my behalf--and as no one in the city appeared to identify my body, it was ordered that I should be interred in the public sepulchre early in the following morning. I lay, in the meantime, without signs of life--although from the moment, I suppose, when the rope was loosened from my neck, a dim consciousness of my situation oppressed me like the night-mare. I was laid out in a chamber sufficiently small, and very much encumbered with furniture--yet to me it appeared of a size to contain the universe. I have never before or since, in body or in mind, suffered half so much agony as from that single idea. Strange! that the simple conception of abstract magnitude--of infinity--should have been accompanied with pain. Yet so it was. "With how vast a difference," said I, "in life and in death--in time and in eternity--here and hereafter, shall our merest sensations be imbodied!"