"When we arrived on the hill," he says, "whence the castle was
visible, perched on its flank, and the winding valley with the
glittering river threading its way through a meadow artistically laid
out by Nature, Louis Lambert said to me: 'Why, I saw this last night
in a dream.' He recognized the clump of trees under which we were, the
arrangement of the foliage, the colour of the water, the turrets of
the castle, in fine, all the details of the place. . . . I relate this
event," he continues, "first because each man can find in his
existence some phenomenon of sleeping or waking analogous to it; and
next, because it is true and gives an idea of Lambert's prodigious
intelligence. In fact, he deduced from the occurrence an entire
system, possessing himself, like Cuvier, in another order of things,
of a fragment of life to reconstruct a whole creation." And Lambert is
made to develop a theory of the astral body and astral locomotion. The
younger self announces also: "I shall be celebrated--an alchemist of
thought."
With such notions in his head at this early age, it was not surprising
he should have begun, while in his tender teens, a metaphysical
composition entitled _Treatise of the Will_.
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