' Ellis had gone through a no doubt romantic and witty
account of all the houses he had robbed, and all the throats he had
cut in one short life.
His conversation would often pass out of my comprehension, or
indeed I think of any man's, into a labyrinth of abstraction and
subtilty, and then suddenly return with some verbal conceit or
turn of wit. The mind is known to attain, in certain conditions of
trance, a quickness so extraordinary that we are compelled at
times to imagine a condition of unendurable intellectual
intensity, from which we are saved by the merciful stupidity of
the body; & I think that the mind of Edwin Ellis was constantly
upon the edge of trance. Once we were discussing the symbolism of
sex, in the philosophy of Blake, and had been in disagreement all
the afternoon. I began talking with a new sense of conviction, and
after a moment Ellis, who was at his easel, threw down his brush
and said that he had just seen the same explanation in a series of
symbolic visions. 'In another moment,' he said, 'I should have
been off.' We went into the open air and walked up and down to get
rid of that feeling, but presently we came in again and I began
again my explanation, Ellis lying upon the sofa.
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