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Memorials, Scientific and Literary of Andrew Crosse, the Electrician – Cornelia and Andrew Crosse

[Crosse] He had been to Plymouth to see a young friend off, who was going to India to join his regiment. Mr Crosse had come back as far as Exeter, where he slept; he was very much fatigued, and felt low.

He described that he had scarcely lain down upon his bed, when a sudden train of thought burst upon him with such intensity that it seemed almost like inspiration: he was not asleep, it was no dream; but yet in imagination he roamed over the universe; and beheld with the eye of fancy the unbounded glories of creation; it appeared to him, he said, as if the soul had quitted its prison of clay, and was free to reach the limits of space, or rather to annihilate space with the intensity of' its perception.

Centuries of time were condensed in those moments of ecstatic life, and Nature's laws seemed clear to the omniscience of its glance: a sense of blessedness sustained him-he felt immortal.

"So thought I, in the dead of silent night,
Till, with the flow of imagery tired,
I sank resistless in the arms of sleep."