Chapter 2

• “the diversity and contrast that subsisted in our characters drew us nearer together.”
• “Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate”
• “I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa.”
• “to penetrate the secrets of nature”
• “My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst for knowledge.”
• “Wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame”
• “so soon as the dazzling vanished the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump."
• “excited by this catastrophe”
• “It was a strong effort of the spirit of good; but it was ineffectual. Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter terrible destruction.”
• ‘it became a torrent which, in its course, has swept all my hopes and joys.’
• No human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself.
• My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.
• It is even possible that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin.
• I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life
• Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination