"Happily for me," he exclaimed one day, "there are hours of comfort
when I feel as though the walls of the room had fallen and I were
away--away in the fields! What a pleasure it is to let oneself go on
the stream of one's thoughts as a bird is borne up on its wings!"

"Why is green a color so largely diffused throughout creation?" he
would ask me. "Why are there so few straight lines in nature? Why is
it that man, in his structures, rarely introduces curves? Why is it
that he alone, of all creatures, has a sense of straightness?"

These queries revealed long excursions in space. He had, I am sure,
seen vast landscapes, fragrant with the scent of woods. He was always
silent and resigned, a living elegy, always suffering but unable to
complain of suffering. An eagle that needed the world to feed him,
shut in between four narrow, dirty walls; and thus this life became an
ideal life in the strictest meaning of the words. Filled as he was
with contempt of the almost useless studies to which we were
harnessed, Louis went on his skyward way absolutely unconscious of the
things about us.

I, obeying the imitative instinct that is so strong in childhood,
tired to regulate my life in conformity with his. And Louis the more
easily infected me with the sort of torpor in which deep contemplation
leaves the body, because I was younger and more impressionable than
he. Like two lovers, we got into the habit of thinking together in a
common reverie. His intuitions had already acquired that acuteness
which must surely characterize the intellectual perceptiveness of
great poets and often bring them to the verge of madness.

"Do you ever feel," said he to me one day, "as though imagined