His faculties were fatally disordered rather than utterly destroyed.
His penetration, his firmness, and his cunning were gone; but a wreck of
memory, useless and unmanageable--a certain capacity for momentary
observation still remained to him. The shameful miscarriage in the tent
of Alaric, which had overthrown his faculties, had passed from him as an
event that never happened, but he remembered fragments of his past
existence--he still retained a vague consciousness of the ruling purpose
of his whole life.
These embryo reflections, disconnected and unsustained, flitted to and
fro over his dark mind as luminous exhalations over a marsh--rising and
sinking, harmless and delusive, fitful and irregular. What he remembered
of the past he remembered carelessly, viewing it with as vacant a
curiosity as if it were the visionary spectacle of another man's
struggles and misfortunes and hopes, acting under it as under a
mysterious influence, neither the end nor the reason of which he cared
to discover. For the future, it was to his thoughts a perfect blank;
for the present, it was a jarring combination of bodily weariness and
mental repose.
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