Scherer, "read everything." In the second, an
extraordinary power of sustained and concentrated thought, and a
passionate, almost a religious, delight in the exercise of his power.
Knowledge, science, stirred in him no mere sense of curiosity or cold
critical instinct--"he came to his desk as to an altar." "A friend who
knew him well," says M. Scherer, "remembers having heard him speak with
deep emotion of that lofty serenity of mood which he had experienced
during his years in Germany whenever, in the early morning before dawn,
with his reading-lamp beside him, he had found himself penetrating once
more into the region of pure thought, 'conversing with ideas, enjoying
the inmost life of things.'" "Thought," he says somewhere in the
Journal, "is like opium. It can intoxicate us and yet leave us broad
awake." To this intoxication of thought he seems to have been always
specially liable, and his German experience--unbalanced, as such an
experience generally is with a young man, by family life, or by any
healthy commonplace interests and pleasures--developed the intellectual
passion in him to an abnormal degree. For four years he had devoted
himself to the alternate excitement and satisfaction of this passion. He
had read enormously, thought enormously, and in the absence of any
imperative claim on the practical side of him, the accumulative,
reflective faculties had grown out of all proportion to the rest of the
personality.
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