To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention rivetted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book--to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor--to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire--to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower--to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind--to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in--Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation. Yet let me not be misapprehended. The undue, intense, and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be confounded in character with that ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially indulged in by persons of ardent imagination. By no means. It was not even, as might be at first supposed, an extreme condition, or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct and different. In the one instance the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually _not_ frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day-dream _often replete with luxury_, he finds the _incitamentum_ or first cause of his musings utterly vanished and forgotten. In my case the primary object was _invariably frivolous_, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions--if any--were made; and those few pertinaciously returning in, so to speak, upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were _never_ pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the _attentive_, and are, with the day-dreamer, the _speculative_.