Most persons make
one more or less clear from looks, tones, and symbols:--this woman, in
the long leisure of her loneliness, and a mind bent upon itself,
attempted to compose one of letters and words. I look upon it as no gift
from without, but a growth from her own mind.
Her invention of a machine, of which she made a drawing, her power of
drawing correctly her life-circle, and sun-circle, and the mathematical
feeling she had of her existence, in correspondent sections of the two,
are also valuable as mental facts. These figures describe her history
and exemplify the position of mathematics toward the world of creative
thought.
Every fact of mental existence ought to be capable of similar
demonstration. I attach no especial importance to her circles:--we all
live in such; all who observe themselves have the same sense of
exactness and harmony in the revolutions of their destiny. But few
attend to what is simple and invariable in the motions of their minds,
and still fewer seek out means clearly to express them to others.
Goethe has taken up these facts in his Wanderjahre, where he speaks of
his Macaria; also, one of these persons who are compensated for bodily
infirmity by a more concentrated and acute state of mind, and consequent
accesses of wisdom, as being bound to a star. When she was engaged by a
sense of these larger revolutions, she seemed to those near her on the
earth, to be sick; when she was, in fact, lower, but better adapted to
the details and variations of an earthly life, these said she was well.
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