When Montesquieu was deeply engaged in his great work, he writes to a friend:—"The favour which your friend Mr. Hein, often does me to pass his mornings with me, occasions great damage to my work as well by his impure French as the length of his details."—"We are afraid," said some of those visitors to BAXTER, "that we break in upon your time."—"To be sure you do," replied the disturbed and blunt scholar. To hint as gently as he could to his friends that he was avaricious of time, one of the learned Italians had a prominent inscription over the door of his study, intimating that whoever remained there must join in his labours. The amiable MELANCTHON, incapable of a harsh expression, when he received these idle visits, only noted down the time he had expended, that he might reanimate his industry, and not lose a day. EVELYN, continually importuned by morning visitors, or "taken up by other impertinencies of my life in the country," stole his hours from his night rest "to redeem his losses." The literary character has been driven to the most inventive shifts to escape the irruption of a formidable party at a single rush, who enter, without "besieging or beseeching," as Milton has it. The late Mr. Ellis, a man of elegant tastes and poetical temperament, on one of these occasions, at his country-house, assured a literary friend, that when driven to the last, he usually made his escape by a leap out of the window; and Boileau has noticed a similar dilemma when at the villa of the President Lamoignon, while they were holding their delightful conversations in his grounds.

Quelquefois de facheux arrivent trois volees, Que du parc a l'instant assiegent les allees; Alors sauve qui peut, et quatre fois heureux Qui sait s'echapper, a quelque autre ignore d'eux.

BRAND HOLLIS endeavoured to hold out "the idea of singularity as a shield;" and the great ROBERT BOYLE was compelled to advertise in a newspaper that he must decline visits on certain days, that he might have leisure to finish some of his works.[A]

[Footnote A: This curious advertisement is preserved in Dr. Birch's "Life of Boyle," p. 272. Boyle's labours were so exhausting to his naturally weak frame, and so continuous from his eager desire for investigation, that this advertisement was concocted by the advice of his physician, "to desire to be excused from receiving visits (unless upon occasions very extraordinary) two days in the week, namely, on the forenoon of Tuesdays and Fridays (both foreign post days), and on Wednesdays and Saturdays in the afternoons, that he may have some time, both to recruit his spirits, to range his papers, and fill up the lacunae of them, and to take some care of his affairs in Ireland, which are very much disordered and have their face often changed by the public calamities there." He ordered likewise a board to be placed over his door, with an inscription signifying when he did, and when he did not receive visits.—ED.]

BOCCACCIO has given an interesting account of the mode of life of the studious Petrarch, for on a visit he found that Petrarch would not suffer his hours of study to be broken into even, by the person whom of all men he loved most, and did not quit his morning studies for his guest, who during that time occupied himself by reading or transcribing the works of his master. At the decline of day, Petrarch quitted his study for his garden, where he delighted to open his heart in mutual confidence.

But this solitude, at first a necessity, and then a pleasure, at length is not borne without repining. To tame the fervid wildness of youth to the strict regularities of study, is a sacrifice performed by the votary; but even MILTON appears to have felt this irksome period of life; for in the preface to "Smectymnuus" he says:—"It is but justice not to defraud of due esteem the wearisome labours and studious watchings wherein I have spent and tired out almost a whole youth." COWLEY, that enthusiast for seclusion, in his retirement calls himself "the Melancholy Cowley." I have seen an original letter of this poet to Evelyn, where he expresses his eagerness to see Sir George Mackenzie's "Essay on Solitude;" for a copy of which he had sent over the town, without obtaining one, being "either all bought up, or burnt in the fire of London."[A]—"I am the more desirous," he says, "because it is a subject in which I am most deeply interested." Thus Cowley was requiring a book to confirm his predilection, and we know he made the experiment, which did not prove a happy one. We find even GIBBON, with all his fame about him, anticipating the dread he entertained of solitude in advanced life. "I feel, and shall continue to feel, that domestic solitude, however it may be alleviated by the world, by study, and even by friendship, is a comfortless state, which will grow more painful as I descend in the vale of years." And again:—"Your visit has only served to remind me that man, however amused or occupied in his closet, was not made to live alone."

[Footnote A: This event happening when London was the chief emporium of books, occasioned many printed just before the time to be excessively rare. The booksellers of Paternoster-row had removed their stock to the vaults below St. Paul's for safety as the fire approached them. Among the stock was Prynne's records, vol. iii., which were all burnt, except a few copies which had been sent into the country, a perfect set has been valued in consequence at one hundred pounds. The rarity of all books published about the era of the great fire of London induced one curious collector, Dr. Bliss, of Oxford, to especially devote himself to gathering such in his library.—ED.]

Had the mistaken notions of Sprat not deprived us of Cowley's correspondence, we doubtless had viewed the picture of lonely genius touched by a tender pencil.[A] But we have SHENSTONE, and GRAY, and SWIFT. The heart of Shenstone bleeds in the dead oblivion of solitude: —"Now I am come from a visit, every little uneasiness is sufficient to introduce my whole train of melancholy considerations, and to make me utterly dissatisfied with the life I now lead, and the life I foresee I shall lead. I am angry, and envious, and dejected, and frantic, and disregard all present things, as becomes a madman to do. I am infinitely pleased, though it is a gloomy joy, with the application of Dr. Swift's complaint, that he is forced to die in a rage, like a rat in a poisoned hole." Let the lover of solitude muse on its picture throughout the year, in this stanza, by the same amiable but suffering poet:—

Tedious again to curse the drizzling day, Again to trace the wintry tracks of snow, Or, soothed by vernal airs, again survey The self-same hawthorns bud, and cowslips blow.

Swift's letters paint with terrifying colours a picture of solitude; and at length his despair closed with idiotism. Even the playful muse of GRESSET throws a sombre querulousness over the solitude of men of genius:—

—Je les vois, victimes du genie, Au foible prix d'un eclat passager, Vivre isoles, sans jouir de la vie! Vingt ans d'ennuis pour quelques jours de gloire.

Such are the necessity, the pleasures, and the inconveniences of solitude! It ceases to be a question whether men of genius should blend with the masses of society; for whether in solitude, or in the world, of all others they must learn to live with themselves. It is in the world that they borrow the sparks of thought that fly upwards and perish but the flame of genius can only be lighted in their own solitary breast.

[Footnote A: See the article on Cowley in "Calamities of Authors."]



CHAPTER XI.

The meditations of genius.—A work on the art of meditation not yet produced.—Predisposing the mind.—Imagination awakens imagination. —Generating feelings by music.—Slight habits.—Darkness and silence, by suspending the exercise of our senses, increase the vivacity of our conceptions.—The arts of memory.—Memory the foundation of genius. —Inventions by several to preserve their own moral and literary character.—And to assist their studies.—The meditations of genius depend on habit.—Of the night-time.—A day of meditation should precede a day of composition.—Works of magnitude from slight conceptions.—Of thoughts never written.—The art of meditation exercised at all hours and places. —Continuity of attention the source of philosophical discoveries. —Stillness of meditation the first state of existence in genius.

A continuity of attention, a patient quietness of mind, forms one of the characteristics of genius. To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius—the men of reasoning and the men of imagination. There is a thread in our thoughts, as there is a pulse in our hearts; he who can hold the one, knows how to think; and he who can move the other, knows how to feel.

A work on the art of meditation has not yet been produced; yet such a work might prove of immense advantage to him who never happened to have more than one solitary idea. The pursuit of a single principle has produced a great system. Thus probably we owe ADAM SMITH to the French economists. And a loose hint has conducted to a new discovery. Thus GIRARD, taking advantage of an idea first started by Fenelon, produced his "Synonymes." But while, in every manual art, every great workman improves on his predecessor, of the art of the mind, notwithstanding the facility of practice, and our incessant experience, millions are yet ignorant of the first rudiments; and men of genius themselves are rarely acquainted with the materials they are working on. Certain constituent principles of the mind itself, which the study of metaphysics curiously developes, offer many important regulations in this desirable art. We may even suspect, since men of genius in the present age have confided to us the secrets of their studies, that this art may be carried on by more obvious means than at first would appear, and even by mechanical contrivances and practical habits. A mind well organised may be regulated by a single contrivance, as by a bit of lead we govern the fine machinery by which we track the flight of time. Many secrets in this art of the mind yet remain as insulated facts, which may hereafter enter into an experimental history.

Johnson has a curious observation on the Mind itself. He thinks it obtains a stationary point, from whence it can never advance, occurring before the middle of life. "When the powers of nature have attained their intended energy, they can be no more advanced. The shrub can never become a tree. Nothing then remains but practice and experience; and perhaps why they do so little may be worth inquiry."[A] The result of this inquiry would probably lay a broader foundation for this art of the mind than we have hitherto possessed, ADAM FERGUSON has expressed himself with sublimity:—"The lustre which man casts around him, like the flame of a meteor, shines only while his motion continues; the moments of rest and of obscurity are the same." What is this art of meditation, but the power of withdrawing ourselves from the world, to view that world moving within ourselves, while we are in repose? As the artist, by an optical instrument, reflects and concentrates the boundless landscape around him, and patiently traces all nature in that small space.

[Footnote A: I recommend the reader to turn to the whole passage, in Johnson's "Betters to Mrs. Thrale," vol. i. p. 296.]

There is a government of our thoughts. The mind of genius can be made to take a particular disposition or train of ideas. It is a remarkable circumstance in the studies of men of genius, that previous to composition they have often awakened their imagination by the imagination of their favourite masters. By touching a magnet, they become a magnet. A circumstance has been, recorded of GRAY, by Mr. Mathias, "as worthy of all acceptation among the higher votaries of the divine art, when they are assured that Mr. Gray never sate down to compose any poetry without previously, and for a considerable time, reading the works of Spenser." But the circumstance was not unusual with Malherbe, Corneille, and Racine; and the most fervid verses of Homer, and the most tender of Euripides, were often repeated by Milton. Even antiquity exhibits the same exciting intercourse of the mind of genius. Cicero informs us how his eloquence caught inspiration from a constant study of the Latin and Grecian poetry; and it has been recorded of Pompey, who was great even in his youth, that he never undertook any considerable enterprise without animating his genius by having read to him the character of Achilles in the first Iliad; although he acknowledged that the enthusiasm he caught came rather from the poet than the hero. When BOSSUET had to compose a funeral oration, he was accustomed to retire for several days to his study, to ruminate over the pages of Homer; and when asked the reason of this habit, he exclaimed, in these lines—

—magnam mihi mentem, animumque Delius inspiret Vates.

It is on the same principle of predisposing the mind, that many have first generated their feelings by the symphonies of music. ALFIERI often before he wrote prepared his mind by listening to music: "Almost all my tragedies were sketched in my mind either in the act of hearing music, or a few hours after"—a circumstance which has been recorded of many others. Lord BACON had music often played in the room adjoining his study: MILTON listened to his organ for his solemn inspiration, and music was even necessary to WARBURTON. The symphonies which awoke in the poet sublime emotions, might have composed the inventive mind of the great critic in the visions of his theoretical mysteries. A celebrated French preacher, Bourdaloue or Massillon, was once found playing on a violin, to screw his mind up to the pitch, preparatory for his sermon, which within a short interval he was to preach before the court. CURRAN'S favourite mode of meditation was with his violin in his hand; for hours together would he forget himself, running voluntaries over the strings, while his imagination in collecting its tones was opening all his faculties for the coming emergency at the bar. When LEONARDO DA VINCI was painting his "Lisa," commonly called La Joconde, he had musicians constantly in waiting, whose light harmonies, by their associations, inspired feelings of

Tipsy dance and revelry.

There are slight habits which may be contracted by genius, which assist the action of the mind; but these are of a nature so trivial, that they seem ridiculous when they have not been experienced: but the imaginative race exist by the acts of imagination. HAYDN would never sit down to compose without being in full dress, with his great diamond ring, and the finest paper to write down his musical compositions. ROUSSEAU has told us, when occupied by his celebrated romance, of the influence of the rose-coloured knots of ribbon which tied his portfolio, his fine paper, his brilliant ink, and his gold sand. Similar facts are related of many. Whenever APOSTOLO ZENO, the predecessor of Metastasio, prepared himself to compose a new drama, he used to say to himself, "Apostolo! recordati che questa e la prima opera che dai in luce."—"Apostolo! remember that this is the first opera you are presenting to the public." We are scarcely aware how we may govern our thoughts by means of our sensations: DE LUC was subject to violent bursts of passion; but he calmed the interior tumult by the artifice of filling his mouth with sweets and comfits. When GOLDONI found his sleep disturbed by the obtrusive ideas still floating from the studies of the day, he contrived to lull himself to rest by conning in his mind a vocabulary of the Venetian dialect, translating some word into Tuscan and French; which being a very uninteresting occupation, at the third or fourth version this recipe never failed. This was an art of withdrawing attention from the greater to the less emotion; by which, as the interest weakened, the excitement ceased. MENDELSSOHN, whose feeble and too sensitive frame was often reduced to the last stage of suffering by intellectual exertion, when engaged in any point of difficulty, would in an instant contrive a perfect cessation from thinking, by mechanically going to the window, and counting the tiles upon the roof of his neighbour's house. Such facts show how much art may be concerned in the government of our thoughts.

It is an unquestionable fact that some profound thinkers cannot pursue their intellectual operations amidst the distractions of light and noise. With them, attention to what is passing within is interrupted by the discordant impressions from objects pressing and obtruding on the external senses. There are indeed instances, as in the case of Priestley and others, of authors who have pursued their literary works amidst conversation and their family; but such minds are not the most original thinkers, and the most refined writers; or their subjects are of a nature which requires little more than judgment and diligence. It is the mind only in its fulness which can brood over thoughts till the incubation produces vitality. Such is the feeling in this act of study. In Plutarch's time they showed a subterraneous place of study built by Demosthenes, and where he often continued for two or three months together. Malebranche, Hobbes, Corneille, and others, darkened their apartment when they wrote, to concentrate their thoughts, as Milton says of the mind, "in the spacious circuits of her musing." It is in proportion as we can suspend the exercise of all our other senses that the liveliness of our conception increases—this is the observation of the most elegant metaphysician of our times; and when Lord Chesterfield advised that his pupil—whose attention wandered on every passing object, which unfitted him for study —should be instructed in a darkened apartment, he was aware of this principle; the boy would learn, and retain what he learned, ten times as well. We close our eyes whenever we would collect our mind together, or trace more distinctly an object which seems to have faded away in our recollection. The study of an author or an artist would be ill placed in the midst of a beautiful landscape; the "Penseroso" of Milton, "hid from day's garish eye," is the man of genius. A secluded and naked apartment, with nothing but a desk, a chair, and a single sheet of paper, was for fifty years the study of BUFFON; the single ornament was a print of Newton placed before his eyes—nothing broke into the unity of his reveries. Cumberland's liveliest comedy, The West Indian, was written in an unfurnished apartment, close in front of an Irish turf-stack; and our comic writer was fully aware of the advantages of the situation. "In all my hours of study," says that elegant writer, "it has been through life my object so to locate myself as to have little or nothing to distract my attention, and therefore brilliant rooms or pleasant prospects I have ever avoided. A dead wall, or, as in the present case, an Irish turf-stack, are not attractions that can call off the fancy from its pursuits; and whilst in these pursuits it can find interest and occupation, it wants no outward aid to cheer it. My father, I believe, rather wondered at my choice." The principle ascertained, the consequences are obvious.

The arts of memory have at all times excited the attention of the studious; they open a world of undivulged mysteries, where every one seems to form some discovery of his own, rather exciting his astonishment than enlarging his comprehension. LE SAGE, a modern philosopher, had a memory singularly defective. Incapable of acquiring languages, and deficient in all those studies which depend on the exercise of the memory, it became the object of his subsequent exertions to supply this deficiency by the order and method he observed in arranging every new fact or idea he obtained; so that in reality with a very bad memory, it appears that he was still enabled to recall at will any idea or any knowledge which he had stored up. JOHN HUNTER happily illustrated the advantages which every one derives from putting his thoughts in writing, "it resembles a tradesman taking stock; without which he never knows either what he possesses, or in what he is deficient." The late WILLIAM HUTTON, a man of an original cast of mind, as an experiment in memory, opened a book which he had divided into 365 columns, according to the days of the year: he resolved to try to recollect an anecdote, for every column, as insignificant and remote as he was able, rejecting all under ten years of age; and to his surprise, he filled those spaces for small reminiscences, within ten columns; but till this experiment had been made, he never conceived the extent of his faculty. WOLF, the German metaphysician, relates of himself that he had, by the most persevering habit, in bed and amidst darkness, resolved his algebraic problems, and geometrically composed all his methods merely by the aid of his imagination and memory; and when in the daytime he verified the one and the other of these operations, he had always found them true. Unquestionably, such astonishing instances of a well-regulated memory depend on the practice of its art gradually formed by frequent associations. When we reflect that whatever we know, and whatever we feel, are the very smallest portions of all the knowledge we have been acquiring, and all the feelings we have experienced through life, how desirable would be that art which should again open the scenes which have vanished, and revivify the emotions which other impressions have effaced? But the faculty of memory, although perhaps the most manageable of all others, is considered a subordinate one; it seems only a grasping and accumulating power, and in the work of genius is imagined to produce nothing of itself; yet is memory the foundation of Genius, whenever this faculty is associated with imagination and passion; with men of genius it is a chronology not merely of events, but of emotions; hence they remember nothing that is not interesting to their feelings. Persons of inferior capacity have imperfect recollections from feeble impressions. Are not the incidents of the great novelist often founded on the common ones of life? and the personages so admirably alive in his fictions, were they not discovered among the crowd? The ancients have described the Muses as the daughters of Memory; an elegant fiction, indicating the natural and intimate connexion between imagination and reminiscence.

The arts of memory will form a saving-bank of genius, to which it may have recourse, as a wealth which it can accumulate imperceptibly amidst the ordinary expenditure. LOCKE taught us the first rudiments of this art, when he showed us how he stored his thoughts and his facts, by an artificial arrangement; and Addison, before he commenced his "Spectators," had amassed three folios of materials. But the higher step will be the volume which shall give an account of a man to himself, in which a single observation immediately becomes a clue of past knowledge, restoring to him his lost studies, and his evanescent existence. Self-contemplation makes the man more nearly entire: and to preserve the past, is half of immortality.

The worth of the diary must depend on the diarist; but "Of the things which concern himself," as MARCUS ANTONINUS entitles his celebrated work —this volume, reserved for solitary contemplation, should be considered as a future relic of ourselves. The late Sir SAMUEL ROMILLY commenced, even in the most occupied period of his life, a diary of his last twelve years; which he declares in his will, "I bequeath to my children, as it may be serviceable to them." Perhaps in this Romilly bore in mind the example of another eminent lawyer, the celebrated WHITELOCKE, who had drawn up a great work, entitled "Remembrances of the Labours of Whitelocke, in the Annals of his Life, for the Instruction of his Children." That neither of these family books has appeared, is our common loss. Such legacies from such men ought to become the inheritance of their countrymen.

To register the transactions of the day, with observations on what, and on whom, he had seen, was the advice of Lord KAIMES to the late Mr. CURWEN; and for years his head never reached its pillow without performing a task which habit had made easy. "Our best and surest road to knowledge," said Lord Kaimes, "is by profiting from the labours of others, and making their experience our own." In this manner Curwen tells us he acquired by habit the art of thinking; and he is an able testimony of the practicability and success of the plan, for he candidly tells us, "Though many would sicken at the idea of imposing such a task upon themselves, yet the attempt, persevered in for a short time, would soon become a custom more irksome to omit than it was difficult to commence."

Could we look into the libraries of authors, the studios of artists, and the laboratories of chemists, and view what they have only sketched, or what lie scattered in fragments, and could we trace their first and last thoughts, we might discover that we have lost more than we possess. There we might view foundations without superstructures, once the monuments of their hopes! A living architect recently exhibited to the public an extraordinary picture of his mind, in his "Architectural Visions of Early Fancy in the Gay Morning of Youth," and which now were "dreams in the evening of life." In this picture he had thrown together all the architectural designs his imagination had conceived, but which remained unexecuted. The feeling is true, however whimsical such unaccomplished fancies might appear when thrown together into one picture. In literary history such instances have occurred but too frequently: the imagination of youth, measuring neither time nor ability, creates what neither time nor ability can execute. ADAM SMITH, in the preface to the first edition of his "Theory of Sentiments," announced a large work on law and government; and in a late edition he still repeated the promise, observing that "Thirty years ago I entertained no doubt of being able to execute everything which it announced." The "Wealth of Nations" was but a fragment of this greater work. Surely men of genius, of all others, may mourn over the length of art and the brevity of life!

Yet many glorious efforts, and even artificial inventions, have been contrived to assist and save its moral and literary existence in that perpetual race which genius holds with time. We trace its triumph in the studious days of such men as GIBBON, Sir WILLIAM JONES, and PRIESTLEY. An invention by which the moral qualities and the acquisitions of the literary character were combined and advanced together, is what Sir WILLIAM JONES ingeniously calls his "Andrometer." In that scale of human attainments and enjoyments which ought to accompany the eras of human life, it reminds us of what was to be learned, and what to be practised, assigning to stated periods their appropriate pursuits. An occasional recurrence, even to so fanciful a standard, would be like looking on a clock to remind the student how he loiters, or how he advances in the great day's work. Such romantic plans have been often invented by the ardour of genius. There was no communication between Sir WILLIAM JONES and Dr. FRANKLIN; yet, when young, the self-taught philosopher of America pursued the same genial and generous devotion to his own moral and literary excellence.

"It was about this time I conceived," says Franklin, "the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection," &c. He began a daily journal, in which against thirteen virtues accompanied by seven columns to mark the days of the week, he dotted down what he considered to be his failures; he found himself fuller of faults than he had imagined, but at length his blots diminished. This self-examination, or this "Faultbook," as Lord Shaftesbury would have called it, was always carried about him. These books still exist. An additional contrivance was that of journalising his twenty-four hours, of which he has furnished us both with descriptions and specimens of the method; and he closes with a solemn assurance, that "It may be well my posterity should be informed, that to this little artifice their ancestor owes the constant felicity of his life." Thus we see the fancy of Jones and the sense of Franklin, unconnected either by character or communication, but acted on by the same glorious feeling to create their own moral and literary character, inventing similar although extraordinary methods.

The memorials of Gibbon and Priestley present us with the experience and the habits of the literary character. "What I have known," says Dr. Priestley, "with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration and my contempt of others. Could we have entered into the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, and have traced all the steps by which he produced his great works, we might see nothing very extraordinary in the process." Our student, with an ingenuous simplicity, opens to us that "variety of mechanical expedients by which he secured and arranged his thoughts," and that discipline of the mind, by means of a peculiar arrangement of his studies for the day and for the year, in which he rivalled the calm and unalterable system pursued by Gibbon, Buffon, and Voltaire, who often only combined the knowledge they obtained by humble methods. They knew what to ask for; and where what is wanted may be found: they made use of an intelligent secretary; aware, as Lord Bacon has expressed it, that some books "may be read by deputy."

Buffon laid down an excellent rule to obtain originality, when he advised the writer first to exhaust his own thoughts, before he attempted to consult other writers; and Gibbon, the most experienced reader of all our writers, offers the same important advice to an author. When engaged on a particular subject, he tells us, "I suspended my perusal of any new book on the subject, till I had reviewed all that I knew, or believed, or had thought on it, that I might be qualified to discern how much the authors added to my original stock." The advice of Lord Bacon, that we should pursue our studies in whatever disposition the mind may be, is excellent. If happily disposed, we shall gain a great step; and if indisposed, we "shall work out the knots and strands of the mind, and make the middle times the more pleasant." Some active lives have passed away in incessant competition, like those of Mozart, Cicero, and Voltaire, who were restless, perhaps unhappy, when their genius was quiescent. To such minds the constant zeal they bring to their labour supplies the absence of that inspiration which cannot always be the same, nor always at its height.

Industry is the feature by which the ancients so frequently describe an eminent character; such phrases as "incredibili industria; diligentia singulars" are usual. We of these days cannot conceive the industry of Cicero; but he has himself told us that he suffered no moments of his leisure to escape from him. Not only his spare hours were consecrated to his books; but even on days of business he would take a few turns in his walk, to meditate or to dictate; many of his letters are dated before daylight, some from the senate, at his meals, and amid his morning levees. The dawn of day was the summons of study to Sir William Jones. John Hunter, who was constantly engaged in the search and consideration of new facts, described what was passing in his mind by a remarkable illustration:—he said to Abernethy, "My mind is like a bee-hive." A simile which was singularly correct; "for," observes Abernethy, "in the midst of buzz and apparent confusion there was great order, regularity of structure, and abundant food, collected with incessant industry from the choicest stores of nature." Thus one man of genius is the ablest commentator on the thoughts and feelings of another. When we reflect on the magnitude of the labours of Cicero and the elder Pliny, on those of Erasmus, Petrarch, Baronius, Lord Bacon, Usher, and Bayle, we seem at the base of these monuments of study, we seem scarcely awake to admire. These were the laborious instructors of mankind; their age has closed.

Yet let not those other artists of the mind, who work in the airy looms of fancy and wit, imagine that they are weaving their webs, without the direction of a principle, and without a secret habit which they have acquired, and which some have imagined, by its quickness and facility, to be an instinct. "Habit," says Reid, "differs from instinct, not in its nature, but in its origin; the last being natural, the first acquired." What we are accustomed to do, gives a facility and proneness to do on like occasions; and there may be even an art, unperceived by themselves, in opening and pursuing a scene of pure invention, and even in the happiest turns of wit. One who had all the experience of such an artist has employed the very terms we have used, of "mechanical" and "habitual." "Be assured," says Goldsmith, "that wit is in some measure mechanical; and that a man long habituated to catch at even its resemblance, will at last be happy enough to possess the substance. By a long habit of writing he acquires a justness of thinking, and a mastery of manner which holiday writers, even with ten times his genius, may vainly attempt to equal." The wit of BUTLER was not extemporaneous, but painfully elaborated from notes which he incessantly accumulated; and the familiar rime of BERNT, the burlesque poet, his existing manuscripts will prove, were produced by perpetual re-touches. Even in the sublime efforts of imagination, this art of meditation may be practised; and ALFIERI has shown us, that in those energetic tragic dramas which were often produced in a state of enthusiasm, he pursued a regulated process. "All my tragedies have been composed three times;" and he describes the three stages of conception, development, and versifying. "After these three operations, I proceed, like other authors, to publish, correct, or amend."

"All is habit in mankind, even virtue itself!" exclaimed METASTASIO; and we may add, even the meditations of genius. Some of its boldest conceptions, are indeed fortuitous, starting up and vanishing almost in the perception; like that giant form, sometimes seen amidst the glaciers, afar from the opposite traveller, moving as he moves, stopping as he stops, yet, in a moment lost, and perhaps never more seen, although but his own reflection! Often in the still obscurity of the night, the ideas, the studies, the whole history of the day, is acted over again. There are probably few mathematicians who have not dreamed of an interesting problem, observes Professor Dugald Stewart. In these vivid scenes we are often so completely converted into spectators, that a great poetical contemporary of our country thinks that even his dreams should not pass away unnoticed, and keeps what he calls a register of nocturnals. TASSO has recorded some of his poetical dreams, which were often disturbed by waking himself in repeating a verse aloud. "This night I awaked with this verse in my mouth—

"E i duo che manda il nero adusto suolo. The two, the dark and burning soil has sent."

He discovered that the epithet black was not suitable; "I again fell asleep, and in a dream I read in Strabo that the sand of Ethiopia and Arabia is extremely white, and this morning I have found the place. You see what learned dreams I have."

But incidents of this nature are not peculiar to this great bard. The improvvisatori poets, we are told, cannot sleep after an evening's effusion; the rhymes are still ringing in their ears, and imagination, if they have any, will still haunt them. Their previous state of excitement breaks into the calm of sleep; for, like the ocean, when its swell is subsiding, the waves still heave and beat. A poet, whether a Milton or a Blackmore, will ever find that his muse will visit his "slumbers nightly." His fate is much harder than that of the great minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who on retiring to rest could throw aside his political intrigues with his clothes; but Sir Robert, to judge by his portrait and anecdotes of him, had a sleekiness and good-humour, and an unalterable equanimity of countenance, not the portion of men of genius: indeed one of these has regretted that his sleep was so profound as not to be interrupted by dreams; from a throng of fantastic ideas he imagined that he could have drawn new sources of poetic imagery. The historian DE THOU was one of those great literary characters who, all his life, was preparing to write the history which he afterwards composed; omitting nothing in his travels and his embassies, which went to the formation of a great man. DE THOU has given a very curious account of his dreams. Such was his passion for study, and his ardent admiration of the great men whom he conversed with, that he often imagined in his sleep that he was travelling in Italy, Germany, and in England, where he saw and consulted the learned, and examined their curious libraries. He had all his lifetime these literary dreams, but more particularly in his travels they reflected these images of the day.

If memory do not chain down these hurrying fading children of the imagination, and

Snatch the faithless fugitives to light

with the beams of the morning, the mind suddenly finds itself forsaken and solitary.[A] ROUSSEAU has uttered a complaint on this occasion. Full of enthusiasm, he devoted to the subject of his thoughts, as was his custom, the long sleepless intervals of his nights. Meditating in bed with his eyes closed, he turned over his periods in a tumult of ideas; but when he rose and had dressed, all was vanished; and when he sat down to his breakfast he had nothing to write. Thus genius has its vespers and its vigils, as well as its matins, which we have been so often told are the true hours of its inspiration; but every hour may be full of inspiration for him who knows to meditate. No man was more practised in this art of the mind than POPE, and even the night was not an unregarded portion of his poetical existence, not less than with LEONARDO DA VINCI, who tells us how often he found the use of recollecting the ideas of what he had considered in the day after he had retired to bed, encompassed by the silence and obscurity of the night. Sleepless nights are the portion of genius when engaged in its work; the train of reasoning is still pursued; the images of fancy catch a fresh illumination; and even a happy expression shall linger in the ear of him who turns about for the soft composure to which his troubled spirit cannot settle.

[Footnote A: One of the most extraordinary instances of inspiration in dreams is told of Tartini, the Italian musician, whose "Devil's Sonata" is well known to musicians. He dreamed that the father of evil played this piece to him, and upon waking he put it on paper. It is a strange wild performance, possessing great originality and vigour.—ED.]

But while with genius so much seems fortuitous, in its great operations the march of the mind appears regular, and requires preparation. The intellectual faculties are not always co-existent, or do not always act simultaneously. Whenever any particular faculty is highly active, while the others are languid, the work, as a work of genius, may be very deficient. Hence the faculties, in whatever degree they exist, are unquestionably enlarged by meditation. It seems trivial to observe that meditation should precede composition, but we are not always aware of its importance; the truth is, that it is a difficulty unless it be a habit. We write, and we find we have written ill; we re-write, and feel we have written well: in the second act of composition we have acquired the necessary meditation. Still we rarely carry on our meditation so far as its practice would enable us. Many works of mediocrity might have approached to excellence, had this art of the mind been exercised. Many volatile writers might have reached even to deep thinking, had they bestowed a day of meditation before a day of composition, and thus engendered their thoughts. Many productions of genius have originally been enveloped in feebleness and obscurity, which have only been brought to perfection by repeated acts of the mind. There is a maxim of Confucius, which in the translation seems quaint, but which is pregnant with sense—

Labour, but slight not meditation; Meditate, but slight not labour.

Few works of magnitude presented themselves at once, in their extent and with their associations, to their authors. Two or three striking circumstances, unobserved before, are perhaps all which the man of genius perceives. It is in revolving the subject that the whole mind becomes gradually agitated; as a summer landscape, at the break of day, is wrapped in mist: at first, the sun strikes on a single object, but the light and warmth increasing, the whole scene glows in the noonday of imagination. How beautifully this state of the mind, in the progress of composition, is described by DRYDEN, alluding to his work, "when it was only a confused mass of thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark; when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished, and then either to be chosen or rejected by the judgment!" At that moment, he adds, "I was in that eagerness of imagination which, by over-pleasing fanciful men, flatters them into the danger of writing." GIBBON tells us of his history, "At the onset all was dark and doubtful; even the title of the work, the true era of the decline and fall of the empire, &c. I was often tempted to cast away the labour of seven years." WINCKELMANN was long lost in composing his "History of Art;" a hundred fruitless attempts were made, before he could discover a plan amidst the labyrinth. Slight conceptions kindle finished works. A lady asking for a few verses on rural topics of the Abbe de Lille, his specimens pleased, and sketches heaped on sketches produced "Les Jardins." In writing the "Pleasures of Memory," as it happened with "The Rape of the Lock," the poet at first proposed a simple description in a few lines, till conducted by meditation the perfect composition of several years closed in that fine poem. That still valuable work, L'Art de Penser of the Port-Royal, was originally projected to teach a young nobleman all that was practically useful in the art of logic in a few days, and was intended to have been written in one morning by the great ARNAULD; but to that profound thinker so many new ideas crowded in that slight task, that he was compelled to call in his friend NICOLLE; and thus a few projected pages closed in a volume so excellent, that our elegant metaphysician has recently declared, that "it is hardly possible to estimate the merits too highly." Pemberton, who knew NEWTON intimately, informs us that his Treatise on Natural Philosophy, full of a variety of profound inventions, was composed by him from scarcely any other materials than the few propositions he had set down several years before, and which having resumed, occupied him in writing one year and a half. A curious circumstance has been preserved in the life of the other immortal man in philosophy, Lord BACON. When young, he wrote a letter to Father Fulgentio concerning an Essay of his, to which he gave the title of "The Greatest Birth of Time," a title which he censures as too pompous. The Essay itself is lost, but it was the first outline of that great design which he afterwards pursued and finished in his "Instauration of the Sciences." LOCKE himself has informed us, that his great work on "The Human Understanding," when he first put pen to paper, he thought "would have been contained in one sheet, but that the farther he went on, the larger prospect he had." In this manner it would be beautiful to trace the history of the human mind, and observe how a NEWTON and a BACON and a LOCKE were proceeding for thirty years together, in accumulating truth upon truth, and finally building up these fabrics of their invention.

Were it possible to collect some thoughts of great thinkers, which were never written, we should discover vivid conceptions, and an originality they never dared to pursue in their works! Artists have this advantage over authors, that their virgin fancies, their chance felicities, which labour cannot afterwards produce, are constantly perpetuated; and those "studies," as they are called, are as precious to posterity as their more complete designs. In literature we possess one remarkable evidence of these fortuitous thoughts of genius. POPE and SWIFT, being in the country together, observed, that if contemplative men were to notice "the thoughts which suddenly present themselves to their minds when walking in the fields, &c., they might find many as well worth preserving as some of their more deliberate reflections." They made a trial, and agreed to write down such involuntary thoughts as occurred during their stay there. These furnished out the "Thoughts" in Pope's and Swift's Miscellanies.[A] Among Lord Bacon's Remains, we find a paper entitled "Sudden Thoughts, set down for Profit." At all hours, by the side of VOLTAIRE'S bed, or on his table, stood his pen and ink with slips of paper. The margins of his books were covered with his "sudden thoughts." CICERO, in reading, constantly took notes and made comments. There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

[Footnote A: This anecdote is found in Ruffhead's "Life of Pope," evidently given by Warburton, as was everything of personal knowledge in that tasteless volume of a mere lawyer, who presumed to write the life of a poet.]

The art of meditation may be exercised at all hours, and in all places; and men of genius, in their walks, at table, and amidst assemblies, turning the eye of the mind inwards, can form an artificial solitude; retired amidst a crowd, calm amidst distraction, and wise amidst folly. When DOMENICHINO was reproached for his dilatory habits, in not finishing a great picture for which he had contracted, his reply described this method of study: Eh! lo la sto continuamente dipingendo entro di me—I am continually painting it within myself. HOGARTH, with an eye always awake to the ridiculous, would catch a character on his thumb-nail. LEONARDO DA VINCI has left a great number of little books which lie usually carried in his girdle, that he might instantly sketch whatever he wished to recal to his recollection; and Amoretti discovered, that, in these light sketches, this fine genius was forming a system of physiognomy which he frequently inculcated to his pupils.[A] HAYDN carefully noted down in a pocket-book the passages and ideas which came to him in his walks or amid company. Some of the great actions of men of this habit of mind were first meditated on amidst the noise of a convivial party, or the music of a concert. The victory of Waterloo might have been organized in the ball-room at Brussels: and thus RODNEY, at the table of Lord Sandwich, while the bottle was briskly circulating, being observed arranging bits of cork, and his solitary amusement having excited inquiry, said that he was practising a plan to annihilate an enemy's fleet. This proved to be that discovery of breaking the line, which the happy audacity of the hero afterwards executed. What situation is more common than a sea-voyage, where nothing presents itself to the reflections of most men than irksome observations on the desert of waters? But the constant exercise of the mind by habitual practice is the privilege of a commanding genius, and, in a similar situation, we discover CICERO and Sir WILLIAM JONES acting alike. Amidst the Oriental seas, in a voyage of 12,000 miles, the mind of JONES kindled with delightful enthusiasm, and he has perpetuated those elevating feelings in his discourse to the Asiatic Society; so CICERO on board a ship, sailing slowly along the coast, passing by a town where his friend Trebatius resided, wrote a work which the other had expressed a wish to possess, and of which wish the view of the town had reminded him.

[Footnote A: A collection of sixty-four of these sketches were published at Paris in 1730. They are remarkable as delineations of mental character in feature as strongly felt as if done under the direction of Larater himself.—ED.]

To this habit of continuity of attention, tracing the first simple idea to its remoter consequences, the philosophical genius owes many of its discoveries. It was one evening in the cathedral of Pisa that GALILEO observed the vibrations of a brass lustre pendent from the vaulted roof, which had been left swinging by one of the vergers. The habitual meditation of genius combined with an ordinary accident a new idea of science, and hence conceived the invention of measuring time by the medium of a pendulum. Who but a genius of this order, sitting in his orchard, and observing the descent of an apple, could have discovered a new quality in matter, and have ascertained the laws of attraction, by perceiving that the same causes might perpetuate the regular motions of the planetary system; who but a genius of this order, while viewing boys blowing soap-bladders, could have discovered the properties of light and colours, and then anatomised a ray? FRANKLIN, on board a ship, observing a partial stillness in the waves when they threw down water which had been used for culinary purposes, by the same principle of meditation was led to the discovery of the wonderful property in oil of calming the agitated ocean; and many a ship has been preserved in tempestuous weather, or a landing facilitated on a dangerous surf, by this solitary meditation of genius.

Thus meditation draws out of the most simple truths the strictness of philosophical demonstration, converting even the amusements of school-boys, or the most ordinary domestic occurrences, into the principle of a new science. The phenomenon of galvanism was familiar to students; yet was there but one man of genius who could take advantage of an accident, give it his name, and fix it as a science. It was while lying in his bath, but still meditating on the means to detect the fraud of the goldsmith who had made Hiero's crown, that the most extraordinary philosopher of antiquity was led to the investigation of a series of propositions demonstrated in the two books of ARCHIMEDES, De insidentibus in fluido, still extant; and which a great mathematician admires both for the strictness and elegance of the demonstrations. To as minute a domestic occurrence as GALVANI'S we owe the steam-engine. When the Marquis of WORCESTER was a State prisoner in the Tower, he one day observed, while his meal was preparing in his apartment, that the cover of the vessel being tight, was, by the expansion of the steam, suddenly forced off, and driven up the chimney. His inventive mind was led on in a train of thought with reference to the practical application of steam as a first mover. His observations, obscurely exhibited in his "Century of Inventions," were successively wrought out by the meditations of others, and an incident, to which one can hardly make a formal reference without a risible emotion, terminated in the noblest instance of mechanical power.

Into the stillness of meditation the mind of genius must be frequently thrown; it is a kind of darkness which hides from us all surrounding objects, even in the light of day. This is the first state of existence in genius. In Cicero's "Treatise on Old Age," we find Cato admiring Caius Sulpitius Gallus, who, when he sat down to write in the morning, was surprised by the evening; and when he took up his pen in the evening, was surprised by the appearance of the morning. SOCRATES sometimes remained a whole day in immovable meditation, his eyes and countenance directed to one spot, as if in the stillness of death. LA FONTAINE, when writing his comic tales, has been observed early in the morning and late in the evening in the same recumbent posture under the same tree. This quiescent state is a sort of enthusiasm, and renders everything that surrounds us as distant as if an immense interval separated us from the scene. Poggius has told us of DANTE, that he indulged his meditations more strongly than any man he knew; for when deeply busied in reading, he seemed to live only in his ideas. Once the poet went to view a public procession; having entered a bookseller's shop, and taken up a book, he sunk into a reverie; on his return he declared that he had neither seen nor heard a single occurrence in the public exhibition, which had passed unobserved before him. It has been told of a modern astronomer, that one summer night, when he was withdrawing to his chamber, the brightness of the heavens showed a phenomenon: he passed the whole night in observing it; and when they came to him early in the morning, and found him in the same attitude, he said, like one who had been recollecting his thoughts for a few moments, "It must be thus; but I'll go to bed before it is late." He had gazed the entire night in meditation, and was not aware of it. Abernethy has finely painted the situation of NEWTON in this state of mind. I will not change his words, for his words are his feelings. "It was this power of mind —which can contemplate the greatest number of facts or propositions with accuracy—that so eminently distinguished Newton from other men. It was this power that enabled him to arrange the whole of a treatise in his thoughts before he committed a single idea to paper. In the exercise of this power, he was known occasionally to have passed a whole night or day, entirely inattentive to surrounding objects."

There is nothing incredible in the stories related of some who have experienced this entranced state in study, where the mind, deliciously inebriated with the object it contemplates, feels nothing, from the excess of feeling, as a philosopher well describes it. The impressions from our exterior sensations are often suspended by great mental excitement. ARCHIMEDES, involved in the investigation of mathematical truth, and the painters PROTOGENES and PARMEGIANO, found their senses locked up as it were in meditation, so as to be incapable of withdrawing themselves from their work, even in the midst of the terrors and storming of the place by the enemy. MARINO was so absorbed in the composition of his "Adonis," that he suffered his leg to be burned before the painful sensation grew stronger than the intellectual pleasure of his imagination. Monsieur THOMAS, a modern French writer, and an intense thinker, would sit for hours against a hedge, composing with a low voice, taking the same pinch of snuff for half an hour together without being aware that it had long disappeared. When he quitted his apartment, after prolonging his studies there, a visible alteration was observed in his person, and the agitation of his recent thoughts was still traced in his air and manner. With eloquent truth BUFFON described those reveries of the student, which compress his day, and mark the hours by the sensations of minutes! "Invention depends on patience: contemplate your subject long; it will gradually unfold till a sort of electric spark convulses for a moment the brain, and spreads down to the very heart a glow of irritation. Then come the luxuries of genius, the true hours for production and composition —hours so delightful, that I have spent twelve or fourteen successively at my writing-desk, and still been in a state of pleasure." Bishop HORNE, whose literary feelings were of the most delicate and lively kind, has beautifully recorded them in his progress through a favourite and lengthened work—his Commentary on the Psalms. He alludes to himself in the third person; yet who but the self-painter could have caught those delicious emotions which are so evanescent in the deep occupation of pleasant studies? "He arose fresh in the morning to his task; the silence of the night invited him to pursue it; and he can truly say, that food and rest were not preferred before it. Every part improved infinitely upon his acquaintance with it, and no one gave him uneasiness but the last, for then he grieved that his work was done."

This eager delight of pursuing study, this impatience of interruption, and this exultation in progress, are alike finely described by MILTON in a letter to his friend Diodati.

"Such is the character of my mind, that no delay, none of the ordinary cessations for rest or otherwise, I had nearly said care or thinking of the very subject, can hold me back from being hurried on to the destined point, and from completing the great circuit, as it were, of the study in which I am engaged."

Such is the picture of genius viewed in the stillness of MEDITATION; but there is yet a more excited state, when, as if consciousness were mixing with its reveries, in the allusion of a scene, of a person, of a passion, the emotions of the soul affect even the organs of sense. This excitement is experienced when the poet in the excellence of invention, and the philosopher in the force of intellect, alike share in the hours of inspiration and the ENTHUSIASM of genius.



CHAPTER XII.

The enthusiasm of genius.—A state of mind resembling a waking dream distinct from reverie.—The ideal presence distinguished from the real presence.—The senses are really affected in the ideal world, proved by a variety of instances.—Of the rapture or sensation of deep study in art, in science, and literature.—Of perturbed feelings in delirium.—In extreme endurance of attention.—And in visionary illusions.—Enthusiasts in literature and art—of their self-immolations.

We left the man of genius in the stillness of meditation. We have now to pursue his history through that more excited state which occurs in the most active operations of genius, and which the term reverie inadequately indicates. Metaphysical distinctions but ill describe it, and popular language affords no terms for those faculties and feelings which escape the observation of the multitude not affected by the phenomenon.

The illusion produced by a drama on persons of great sensibility, when all the senses are awakened by a mixture of reality with imagination, is the effect experienced by men of genius in their own vivified ideal world. Real emotions are raised by fiction. In a scene, apparently passing in their presence, where the whole train of circumstances succeeds in all the continuity of nature, and where a sort of real existences appear to rise up before them, they themselves become spectators or actors. Their sympathies are excited, and the exterior organs of sense are visibly affected—they even break out into speech, and often accompany their speech with gestures.

In this equivocal state the enthusiast of genius produces his masterpieces. This waking dream is distinct from reverie, where, our thoughts wandering without connexion, the faint impressions are so evanescent as to occur without even being recollected. A day of reverie is beautifully painted by ROUSSEAU as distinct from a day of thinking: "J'ai des journees delicieuses, errant sans souci, sans projet, sans affaire, de bois en bois, et de rocher en rocher, revant toujours et ne pensant point." Far different, however, is one closely-pursued act of meditation, carrying the enthusiast of genius beyond the precinct of actual existence. The act of contemplation then creates the thing contemplated. He is now the busy actor in a world which he himself only views; alone, he hears, he sees, he touches, he laughs, he weeps; his brows and lips, and his very limbs move.

Poets and even painters, who, as Lord Bacon describes witches, "are imaginative," have often involuntarily betrayed, in the act of composition, those gestures which accompany this enthusiasm. Witness DOMENICHINO enraging himself that he might portray anger. Nor were these creative gestures quite unknown to QUINTILIAN, who has nobly compared them to the lashings of the lion's tail, rousing him to combat. Actors of genius have accustomed themselves to walk on the stage for an hour before the curtain was drawn, that they might fill their minds with all the phantoms of the drama, and so suspend all communion with the external world. The great actress of our age, during representation, always had the door of her dressing-room open, that she might listen to, and if possible watch the whole performance, with the same attention as was experienced by the spectators. By this means she possessed herself of all the illusion of the scene; and when she herself entered on the stage, her dreaming thoughts then brightened into a vision, where the perceptions of the soul were as firm and clear as if she were really the Constance or the Katherine whom she only represented.[A]

[Footnote A: The late Mrs. SIDDONS. She herself communicated this striking circumstance to me.]

Aware of this peculiar faculty, so prevalent in the more vivid exercise of genius, Lord KAIMES seems to have been the first who, in a work on criticism, attempted to name the ideal presence, to distinguish it from the real presence of things. It has been called the representative faculty, the imaginative state, and many other states and faculties. Call it what we will, no term opens to us the invisible mode of its operations, no metaphysical definition expresses its variable nature. Conscious of the existence of such a faculty, our critic perceived that the conception of it is by no means clear when described in words.

Has not the difference between an actual thing, and its image in a glass, perplexed some philosophers? and it is well known how far the ideal philosophy has been carried by so fine a genius as Bishop BERKELEY. "All are pictures, alike painted on the retina, or optical sensorium!" exclaimed the enthusiast BARRY, who only saw pictures in nature, and nature in pictures. This faculty has had a strange influence over the passionate lovers of statues. We find unquestionable evidence of the vividness of the representative faculty, or the ideal presence, vying with that of reality. EVELYN has described one of this cast of mind, in the librarian of the Vatican, who haunted one of the finest collections at Rome. To these statues he would frequently talk as if they were living persons, often kissing and embracing them. A similar circumstance might be recorded of a man of distinguished talent and literature among ourselves. Wondrous stories are told of the amatorial passion for marble statues; but the wonder ceases, and the truth is established, when the irresistible ideal presence is comprehended; the visions which now bless these lovers of statues, in the modern land of sculpture, Italy, had acted with equal force in ancient Greece. "The Last Judgment," the stupendous ideal presence of MICHAEL ANGELO, seems to have communicated itself to some of his beholders: "As I stood before this picture," a late traveller tells us, "my blood chilled as if the reality were before me, and the very sound of the trumpet seemed to pierce my ears."

Cold and barren tempers without imagination, whose impressions of objects never rise beyond those of memory and reflection, which know only to compare, and not to excite, will smile at this equivocal state of the ideal presence; yet it is a real one to the enthusiast of genius, and it is his happiest and peculiar condition. Destitute of this faculty, no metaphysical aid, no art to be taught him, no mastery of talent will avail him: unblest with it, the votary will find each sacrifice lying cold on the altar, for no accepting flame from heaven shall kindle it.

This enthusiasm indeed can only be discovered by men of genius themselves; yet when most under its influence, they can least perceive it, as the eye which sees all things cannot view itself; or, rather, such an attempt would be like searching for the principle of life, which were it found would cease to be life. From an enchanted man we must not expect a narrative of his enchantment; for if he could speak to us reasonably, and like one of ourselves, in that case he would be a man in a state of disenchantment, and then would perhaps yield us no better account than we may trace by our own observations.

There is, however, something of reality in this state of the ideal presence; for the most familiar instances will show how the nerves of each external sense are put in motion by the idea of the object, as if the real object had been presented to it. The difference is only in the degree. The senses are more concerned in the ideal world than at first appears. The idea of a thing will make us shudder; and the bare imagination of it will often produce a real pain. A curious consequence may be deduced from this principle; MILTON, lingering amid the freshness of nature in Eden, felt all the delights of those elements which he was creating; his nerves moved with the images which excited them. The fierce and wild DANTE, amidst the abysses of his "Inferno," must often have been startled by its horrors, and often left his bitter and gloomy spirit in the stings he inflicted on the great criminal. The moveable nerves, then, of the man of genius are a reality, he sees, he hears, he feels, by each. How mysterious to us is the operation of this faculty!

A HOMER and a RICHARDSON,[A] like nature, open a volume large as life itself—embracing a circuit of human existence! This state of the mind has even a reality in it for the generality of persons. In a romance or a drama, tears are often seen in the eyes of the reader or the spectator, who, before they have time to recollect that the whole is fictitious, have been surprised for a moment by a strong conception of a present and existing scene.

[Footnote A: Richardson assembles a family about him, writing down what they said, seeing their very manner of saying, living with them as often and as long as he wills—with such a personal unity, that an ingenious lawyer once told me that he required no stronger evidence of a fact in any court of law than a circumstantial scene in Richardson.]

Can we doubt of the reality of this faculty, when the visible and outward frame of the man of genius bears witness to its presence? When FIELDING said, "I do not doubt but the most pathetic and affecting scenes have been writ with tears," he probably drew that discovery from an inverse feeling to his own. Fielding would have been gratified to have confirmed the observation by facts which never reached him. Metastasio, in writing the ninth scene of the second act of his Olympiad, found himself suddenly moved—shedding tears. The imagined sorrows had inspired real tears; and they afterwards proved contagious. Had our poet not perpetuated his surprise by an interesting sonnet, the circumstance had passed away with the emotion, as many such have. Pope could never read Priam's speech for the loss of his son without tears, and frequently has been observed to weep over tender and melancholy passages. ALFIERI, the most energetic poet of modern times, having composed, without a pause, the whole of an act, noted in the margin—"Written under a paroxysm of enthusiasm, and while shedding a flood of tears." The impressions which the frame experiences in this state, leave deeper traces behind them than those of reverie. A circumstance accidentally preserved has informed us of the tremors of DRYDEN after having written that ode,[A] which, as he confessed, he had pursued without the power of quitting it; but these tremors were not unusual with him—for in the preface to his "Tales," he tells us, that "in translating Homer he found greater pleasure than in Virgil; but it was not a pleasure without pain; the continual agitation of the spirits must needs be a weakener to any constitution, especially in age, and many pauses are required for refreshment betwixt the heats."

[Footnote A: This famous and unparalleled ode was probably afterwards retouched; but Joseph Warton discovered in it the rapidity of the thoughts, and the glow and the expressiveness of the images; which are the certain marks of the first sketch of a master.]

We find Metastasio, like others of the brotherhood, susceptible of this state, complaining of his sufferings during the poetical aestus. "When I apply with attention, the nerves of my sensorium are put into a violent tumult; I grow as red as a drunkard, and am obliged to quit my work." When BUFFON was absorbed on a subject which presented great objections to his opinions, he felt his head burn, and saw his countenance flushed; and this was a warning for him to suspend his attention. GRAY could never compose voluntarily: his genius resembled the armed apparition in Shakspeare's master-tragedy. "He would not be commanded." When he wished to compose the Installation Ode, for a considerable time he felt himself without the power to begin it: a friend calling on him, GRAY flung open his door hastily, and in a hurried voice and tone, exclaiming in the first verse of that ode—

Hence, avaunt! 'tis holy ground!—

his friend started at the disordered appearance of the bard, whose orgasm had disturbed his very air and countenance.

Listen to one labouring with all the magic of the spell. Madame ROLAND has thus powerfully described the ideal presence in her first readings of Telemachus and Tassot:—"My respiration rose, I felt a rapid fire colouring my face, and my voice changing had betrayed my agitation. I was Eucharis for Telemachus, and Erminia for Tancred. However, during this perfect transformation, I did not yet think that I myself was anything, for any one: the whole had no connexion with myself. I sought for nothing around me; I was they; I saw only the objects which existed for them; it was a dream, without being awakened."

The description which so calm and exquisite an investigator of taste and philosophy as our sweet and polished REYNOLDS has given of himself at one of these moments, is too rare not to be recorded in his own words. Alluding to the famous "Transfiguration," our own RAFFAELLE says—"When I have stood looking at that picture from figure to figure, the eagerness, the spirit, the close unaffected attention of each figure to the principal action, my thoughts have carried me away, that I have forgot myself; and for that time might be looked upon as an enthusiastic madman; for I could really fancy the whole action was passing before my eyes."

The effect which the study of Plutarch's Illustrious Men produced on the mighty mind of ALFIERI, during a whole winter, while he lived as it were among the heroes of antiquity, he has himself described. Alfieri wept and raved with grief and indignation that he was born under a government which favoured no Roman heroes and sages. As often as he was struck with the great deeds of these great men, in his extreme agitation he rose from his seat as one possessed. The feeling of genius in Alfieri was suppressed for more than twenty years, by the discouragement of his uncle: but as the natural temperament cannot be crushed out of the soul of genius, he was a poet without writing a single verse; and as a great poet, the ideal presence at times became ungovernable, verging to madness. In traversing the wilds of Arragon, his emotions would certainly have given birth to poetry, could he have expressed himself in verse. It was a complete state of the imaginative existence, or this ideal presence; for he proceeded along the wilds of Arragon in a reverie, weeping and laughing by turns. He considered this as a folly, because it ended in nothing but in laughter and tears. He was not aware that he was then yielding to a demonstration, could he have judged of himself, that he possessed those dispositions of mind and that energy of passion which form the poetical character.

Genius creates by a single conception; the statuary conceives the statue at once, which he afterwards executes by the slow process of art; and the architect contrives a whole palace in an instant. In a single principle, opening as it were on a sudden to genius, a great and new system of things is discovered. It has happened, sometimes, that this single conception, rushing over the whole concentrated spirit, has agitated the frame convulsively. It comes like a whispered secret from Nature. When MALEBRANCHE first took up Descartes's Treatise on Man, the germ of his own subsequent philosophic system, such was his intense feeling, that a violent palpitation of the heart, more than once, obliged him to lay down the volume. When the first idea of the "Essay on the Arts and Sciences" rushed on the mind of ROUSSEAU, a feverish symptom in his nervous system approached to a slight delirium. Stopping under an oak, he wrote with a pencil the Proso-popeia of Fabricius. "I still remember my solitary transport at the discovery of a philosophical argument against the doctrine of transubstantiation," exclaimed GIBBON in his Memoirs.

This quick sensibility of genius has suppressed the voice of poets in reciting their most pathetic passages. THOMSON was so oppressed by a passage in Virgil or Milton when he attempted to read, that "his voice sunk in ill-articulated sounds from the bottom of his breast." The tremulous figures of the ancient Sibyl appear to have been viewed in the land of the Muses, by the energetic description which Paulus Jovius gives us of the impetus and afflatus of one of the Italian improvvisatori, some of whom, I have heard from one present at a similar exhibition, have not degenerated in poetic inspiration, nor in its corporeal excitement. "His eyes fixed downwards, kindle as he gives utterance to his effusions, the moist drops flow down his cheeks, the veins of his forehead swell, and wonderfully his learned ear, as it were, abstracted and intent, moderates each impulse of his flowing numbers."[A]

[Footnote A: The passage is curious:—"Canenti defixi exardent oculi, sudores manant, frontis venae contumescunt, et quod mirum est, eruditae aures, tanquam alienae et intentae, omnem impetum profluentium numerorum exactissima ratione moderantur."]

This enthusiasm throws the man of genius amid Nature into absorbing reveries when the senses of other men are overcome at the appearance of destruction; he continues to view only Nature herself. The mind of PLINY, to add one more chapter to his mighty scroll, sought Nature amidst the volcano in which he perished. VERNET was on board a ship in a raging tempest where all hope was given up. The astonished captain beheld the artist of genius, his pencil in his hand, in calm enthusiasm sketching the terrible world of waters—studying the wave that was rising to devour him.[A]

[Footnote A: Vernet was the artist whose sea-ports of France still decorate the Louvre. He was marine painter to Louis XV. and grandfather of the celebrated Horace Vernet, whose recent death has deprived France of her best painter of battle-scenes.—ED.]

There is a tender enthusiasm in the elevated studies of antiquity. Then the ideal presence or the imaginative existence prevails, by its perpetual associations, or as the late Dr. Brown has, perhaps, more distinctly termed them, suggestions. "In contemplating antiquity, the mind itself becomes antique," was finely observed by Livy, long ere our philosophy of the mind existed as a system. This rapture, or sensation of deep study, has been described by one whose imagination had strayed into the occult learning of antiquity, and in the hymns of Orpheus it seemed to him that he had lifted the veil from Nature. His feelings were associated with her loneliness. I translate his words:—"When I took these dark mystical hymns into my hands, I appeared as it were to be descending into an abyss of the mysteries of venerable antiquity; at that moment, the world in silence and the stars and moon only, watching me." This enthusiasm is confirmed by Mr. Mathias, who applies this description to his own emotions on his first opening the manuscript volumes of the poet Gray on the philosophy of Plato; "and many a learned man," he adds, "will acknowledge as his own the feelings of this animated scholar."

Amidst the monuments of great and departed nations, our Imagination is touched by the grandeur of local impressions, and the vivid associations, or suggestions, of the manners, the arts, and the individuals, of a great people. The classical author of Anacharsis, when in Italy, would often stop as if overcome by his recollections. Amid camps, temples, circuses, hippodromes, and public and private edifices, he, as it were, held an interior converse with the manes of those who seemed hovering about the capital of the old world; as if he had been a citizen of ancient Rome travelling in the modern. So men of genius have roved amid the awful ruins till the ideal presence has fondly built up the city anew, and have become Romans in the Rome of two thousand years past. POMPONOIUS LETUS, who devoted his life to this study, was constantly seen wandering amidst the vestiges of this "throne of the world." There, in many a reverie, as his eye rested on the mutilated arch and the broken column, abstracted and immovable, he dropped tears in the ideal presence of Rome and of the Romans.[A] Another enthusiast of this class was BOSIUS, who sought beneath Rome for another Rome, in those catacombs built by the early Christians for their asylum and their sepulchre. His work of "Roma Sotteranea" is the production of a subterraneous life, passed in fervent and perilous labours. Taking with him a hermit's meal for the week, this new Pliny often descended into the bowels of the earth, by lamp-light, clearing away the sand and ruins till a tomb broke forth, or an inscription became legible. Accompanied by some friend whom his enthusiasm had inspired with his own sympathy, here he dictated his notes, tracing the mouldering sculpture, and catching the fading picture. Thrown back into the primitive ages of Christianity, amid the local impressions, the historian of the Christian catacombs collected the memorials of an age and of a race which were hidden beneath the earth.[B]

[Footnote A: Shelley caught much of his poetry in wandering among the ruins of the palace of the Caesars on the Palatine Hill; and the impression made by historic ruins on the mind of Byron is powerfully evinced in his "Childe Harold."—ED.]

[Footnote B: A large number of these important memorials have been since removed to the Galleria Lapidaria of the Vatican, and arranged on the walls by Marini. They are invaluable as mementoes of the early Church at Rome. Aringhi has also devoted a work to their elucidation. The Rev. C. Maitland's "Church in the Catacombs" is an able general summary, clearly displaying their intrinsic historic value—ED.]

The same enthusiasm surrounds the world of science with that creative imagination which has startled even men of science by its peculiar discoveries. WERNER, the mineralogist, celebrated for his lectures, appears, by some accounts transmitted by his auditors, to have exercised this faculty. Werner often said that "he always depended on the muse for inspiration." His unwritten lecture was a reverie—till kindling in his progress, blending science and imagination in the grandeur of his conceptions, at times, as if he had gathered about him the very elements of nature, his spirit seemed to be hovering over the waters and the strata. With the same enthusiasm of science, CUVIER meditated on some bones, and some fragments of bones, which could not belong to any known class of the animal kingdom. The philosopher dwelt on these animal ruins till he constructed numerous species which had disappeared from the globe. This sublime naturalist has ascertained and classified the fossil remains of animals whose existence can no longer be traced in the records of mankind. His own language bears testimony to the imagination which carried him on through a career so strange and wonderful. "It is a rational object of ambition in the mind of man, to whom only a short space of time is allotted upon earth, to have the glory of restoring the history of thousands of ages which preceded the existence of his race, and of thousands of animals that never were contemporaneous with his species." Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius. Even in the practical part of a science, painful to the operator himself, Mr. Abernethy has declared, and eloquently declared, that this enthusiasm is absolutely requisite. "We have need of enthusiasm, or some strong incentive, to induce us to spend our nights in study, and our days in the disgusting and health-destroying observation of human diseases, which alone can enable us to understand, alleviate, or remove them. On no other terms can we be considered as real students of our profession—to confer that which sick kings would fondly purchase with their diadem—that which wealth cannot purchase, nor state nor rank bestow—to alleviate the most insupportable of human afflictions." Such is the enthusiasm of the physiologist of genius, who elevates the demonstrations of anatomical inquiries by the cultivation of the intellectual faculties, connecting "man with the common Master of the universe."

This enthusiasm inconceivably fills the mind of genius in all great and solemn operations. It is an agitation amidst calmness, and is required hot only in the fine arts, but wherever a great and continued exertion of the soul must be employed. The great ancients, who, if they were not always philosophers, were always men of genius, saw, or imagined they saw, a divinity within the man. This enthusiasm is alike experienced in the silence of study and amidst the roar of cannon, in painting a picture or in scaling a rampart. View DE THOU, the historian, after his morning prayers, imploring the Divinity to purify his heart from partiality and hatred, and to open his spirit in developing the truth, amidst the contending factions of his times; and HAYDN, employed in his "Creation," earnestly addressing the Creator ere he struck his instrument. In moments like these, man becomes a perfect unity—one thought and one act, abstracted from all other thoughts and all other acts. This intensity of the mind was felt by GRAY in his loftiest excursions, and is perhaps the same power which impels the villager, when, to overcome his rivals in a contest for leaping, he retires hack some steps, collects all exertion into his mind, and clears the eventful bound. One of our admirals in the reign of Elizabeth held as a maxim, that a height of passion, amounting to frenzy, was necessary to qualify a man for the command of a fleet; and NELSON, decorated by all his honours about him, on the day of battle, at the sight of those emblems of glory emulated himself. This enthusiasm was necessary for his genius, and made it effective.

But this enthusiasm, prolonged as it often has been by the operation of the imaginative existence, becomes a state of perturbed feeling, and can only be distinguished from a disordered intellect by the power of volition possessed by a sound mind of withdrawing from the ideal world into the world of sense. It is but a step which may carry us from the wanderings of fancy into the aberrations of delirium. The endurance of attention, even in minds of the highest order, is limited by a law of nature; and when thinking is goaded on to exhaustion, confusion of ideas ensues, as straining any one of our limbs by excessive exertion produces tremor and torpor.

With curious art the brain too finely wrought Preys on herself and is destroyed by Thought; Constant attention wears the active mind, Blots out her powers, and leaves a blank behind— The greatest genius to this fate may bow.

Even minds less susceptible than high genius may become overpowered by their imagination. Often, in the deep silence around us, we seek to relieve ourselves by some voluntary noise or action which may direct our attention to an exterior object, and bring us back to the world, which we had, as it were, left behind us. The circumstance is sufficiently familiar; as well as another; that whenever we are absorbed in profound contemplation, a startling noise scatters the spirits, and painfully agitates the whole frame. The nerves are then in a state of the utmost relaxation. There may be an agony in thought which only deep thinkers experience. The terrible effect of metaphysical studies on BEATTIE has been told by himself. "Since the 'Essay on Truth' was printed in quarto, I have never dared to read it over. I durst not even read the sheets to see whether there were any errors in the print, and was obliged to get a friend to do that office for me. These studies came in time to have dreadful effects upon my nervous system; and I cannot read what I then wrote without some degree of horror, because it recalls to my mind the horrors that I have sometimes felt after passing a long evening in those severe studies."

GOLDONI, after a rash exertion of writing sixteen plays in a year, confesses he paid the penalty of the folly. He flew to Genoa, leading a life of delicious vacuity. To pass the day without doing anything, was all the enjoyment he was now capable of feeling. But long after he said, "I felt at that time, and have ever since continued to feel, the consequence of that exhaustion of spirits I sustained in composing my sixteen comedies."

The enthusiasm of study was experienced by POPE in his self-education, and once it clouded over his fine intellect. It was the severity of his application which distorted his body; and he then partook of a calamity incidental to the family of genius, for he sunk into that state of exhaustion which SMOLLETT experienced during half a year, called a coma vigil, an affection of the brain, where the principle of life is so reduced, that all external objects appear to be passing in a dream. BOERHAAVE has related of himself, that having imprudently indulged in intense thought on a particular subject, he did not close his eyes for six weeks after; and TISSOT, in his work on the health of men of letters, abounds in similar cases, where a complete stupor has affected the unhappy student for a period of six months.

Assuredly the finest geniuses have not always the power to withdraw themselves from that intensely interesting train of ideas, which we have shown has not been removed from about them by even the violent stimuli of exterior objects; and the scenical illusion which then occurs, has been called the hallucinatio studiosa, or false ideas in reverie. Such was the state in which PETRARCH found himself, in that minute narrative of a vision in which Laura appeared to him; and TASSO, in the lofty conversations he held with a spirit that glided towards him on the beams of the sun. In this state was MALEBRANCHE listening to the voice of God within him; and Lord HERBEBT, when, to know whether he should publish his book, he threw himself on his knees, and interrogated the Deity in the stillness of the sky.[A] And thus PASCAL started at times at a fiery gulf opening by his side. SPINELLO having painted the fall of the rebellious angels, had so strongly imagined the illusion, and more particularly the terrible features of Lucifer, that he was himself struck with such horror as to have been long afflicted with the presence of the demon to which his genius had given birth. The influence of the game ideal presence operated on the religious painter ANGELONI, who could never represent the sufferings of Jesus without his eyes overflowing with tears. DESCARTES, when young, and in a country seclusion, his brain exhausted with meditation, and his imagination heated to excess, heard a voice in the air which called him to pursue the search of truth; nor did he doubt the vision, and this delirious dreaming of genius charmed him even in his after-studies. Our COLLINS and COWPER were often thrown into that extraordinary state of mind, when the ideal presence converts us into visionaries; and their illusions were as strong as SEEDENBORG'S, who saw a terrestrial heaven in the glittering streets of his New Jerusalem; or JACOB BEHMEN'S, who listened to a celestial voice till he beheld the apparition of an angel; or CARDAN'S, when he so carefully observed a number of little armed men at his feet; or BENVENUTO CELLINI'S, whose vivid imagination and glorious egotism so frequently contemplated "a resplendent light hovering over his shadow."

[Footnote A: In his curious autobiography he has given the prayer he used, ending "I am not satisfied whether I shall publish this book de veritate; if it be for thy glory, I beseech thee give me some sign from heaven; if not I shall suppress it." His lordships adds, "I had no sooner spoken these words but a loud, though gentle noise came from the heavens (for it was like nothing on earth) which did so comfort and cheer me, that I took my petition as granted, and that I had the sign I demanded, whereupon also I resolved to print my book. This (how strange soever it may seem) I protest before the eternal God is true, neither am I any way superstitiously deceived therein, since I did not only clearly hear the noise, but in the serenest sky that ever I saw, being without all cloud, did to my thinking see the place from whence it came."—ED.]

Such minds identified themselves with their visions! If we pass them over by asserting that they were insane, we are only cutting the knot which we cannot untie. We have no right to deny what some maintain, that a sympathy of the corporeal with the incorporeal nature of man, his imaginative with his physical existence, is an excitement which appears to have been experienced by persons of a peculiar organization, and which metaphysicians in despair must resign to the speculations of enthusiasts themselves, though metaphysicians reason about phenomena far removed from the perceptions of the eye. The historian of the mind cannot omit this fact, unquestionable, however incomprehensible. According to our own conceptions, this state must produce a strange mysterious personage: a concentration of a human being within himself, endowed with inward eyes, ears which listen to interior sounds, and invisible hands touching impalpable objects, for whatever they act or however they are acted on, as far as respects themselves all must have passed within their own minds. The Platonic Dr. MORE flattered himself that he was an enthusiast without enthusiasm, which seems but a suspicious state of convalescence. "I must ingenuously confess," he says, "that I have a natural touch of enthusiasm, in my complexion, but such as I thank God was ever governable enough, and have found at length perfectly subduable. In virtue of which victory I know better what is in enthusiasts than they themselves; and therefore was able to write with life and judgment, and shall, I hope, contribute not a little to the peace and quiet of this kingdom thereby." Thus far one of its votaries: and all that he vaunts to have acquired by this mysterious faculty of enthusiasm is the having rendered it "at length perfectly subduable." Yet those who have written on "Mystical devotion," have declared that, "it is a sublime state of mind to which whole sects have aspired, and some individuals appear to have attained."[A] The histories of great visionaries, were they correctly detailed, would probably prove how their delusions consisted of the ocular spectra of their brain and the accelerated sensations of their nerves. BAYLE has conjured up an amusing theory of apparitions, to show that HOBBES, who was subject to occasional terrors, might fear that a certain combination of atoms agitating his brain might so disorder his mind as to expose him to spectral visions; and so being very timid, and distrusting his own imagination, he was averse at times to be left alone. Apparitions often happen in dreams, but they may happen to a man when awake, for reading and hearing of them would revive their images, and these images might play even an incredulous philosopher some unlucky trick.

[Footnote A: CHARLES BUTLER has drawn up a sensible essay on "Mystical Devotion." He was a Roman Catholic. NORRIS, and Dr. HENRY MORE, and Bishop BERKELEY, may be consulted by the curious.]

But men of genius whose enthusiasm has not been past recovery, have experienced this extraordinary state of the mind, in those exhaustions of study to which they unquestionably are subject. Tissot, on "The Health of Men of Letters," has produced a terrifying number of cases. They see and hear what none but themselves do. Genius thrown into this peculiar state has produced some noble effusions. KOTZEBUE was once absorbed in hypochondriacal melancholy, and appears to have meditated on self-destruction; but it happened that he preserved his habit of dramatic composition, and produced one of his most energetic dramas—that of "Misanthropy and Repentance." He tells us that he had never experienced such a rapid flow of thoughts and images, and he believed, what a physiological history would perhaps show, that there are some maladies, those of the brain and the nerves, which actually stretch the powers of the mind beyond their usual reach. It is the more vivid world of ideal existence.

But what is more evident, men of the finest genius have experienced these hallucinations in society acting on their moral habits. They have insulated the mind. With them ideas have become realities, and suspicions certainties; while events have been noted down as seen and heard, which in truth had never occurred. ROUSSEAU'S phantoms scarcely ever quitted him for a day. BARRY imagined that he was invisibly persecuted by the Royal Academy, who had even spirited up a gang of housebreakers. The vivid memoirs of ALFIERI will authenticate what DONNE, who himself had suffered from them, calls "these eclipses, sudden offuscations and darkening of the senses." Too often the man of genius, with a vast and solitary power, darkens the scene of life; he builds a pyramid between himself and the sun. Mocking at the expedients by which society has contrived to protect its feebleness, he would break down the institutions from which he has shrunk away in the loneliness of his feelings. Such is the insulating intellect in which some of the most elevated spirits have been reduced. To imbue ourselves with the genius of their works, even to think of them, is an awful thing! In nature their existence is a solecism, as their genius is a paradox; for their crimes seem to be without guilt, their curses have kindness in them, and if they afflict mankind it is in sorrow.

Yet what less than enthusiasm is the purchase-price of high passion and invention? Perhaps never has there been a man of genius of this rare cast, who has not betrayed the ebullitions of imagination in some outward action, at that period when the illusions of life are more real to genius than its realities. There is a fata morgana, that throws into the air a pictured land, and the deceived eye trusts till the visionary shadows glide away. "I have dreamt of a golden land," exclaimed FUSELI, "and solicit in vain for the barge which is to carry me to its shore." A slight derangement of our accustomed habits, a little perturbation of the faculties, and a romantic tinge on the feelings, give no indifferent promise of genius; of that generous temper which knowing nothing of the baseness of mankind, with indefinite views carries on some glorious design to charm the world or to make it happier. Often we hear, from the confessions of men of genius, of their having in youth indulged the most elevating and the most chimerical projects; and if age ridicule thy imaginative existence, be assured that it is the decline of its genius. That virtuous and tender enthusiast, FENELON, in his early youth, troubled his friends with a classical and religious reverie. He was on the point of quitting them to restore the independence of Greece, with the piety of a missionary, and with the taste of a classical antiquary. The Peloponnesus opened to him the Church of Corinth where St. Paul preached, the Piraeus where Socrates conversed; while the latent poet was to pluck laurels from Delphi, and rove amidst the amenities of Tempe. Such was the influence of the ideal presence; and barren will be his imagination, and luckless his fortune, who, claiming the honours of genius, has never been touched by such a temporary delirium.

To this enthusiasm, and to this alone, can we attribute the self-immolation of men of genius. Mighty and laborious works have been pursued, as a forlorn hope, at the certain destruction of the fortune of the individual. Vast labours attest the enthusiasm which accompanied their progress. Such men have sealed their works with their blood: they have silently borne the pangs of disease; they have barred themselves from the pursuits of fortune; they have torn themselves away from all they loved in life, patiently suffering these self-denials, to escape from interruptions and impediments to their studies. Martyrs of literature and art, they behold in their solitude the halo of immortality over their studious heads—that fame which is "a life beyond life." VAN HELMONT, in his library and his laboratory, preferred their busy solitude to the honours and the invitations of Rodolphus II., there writing down what he daily experienced during thirty years; nor would the enthusiast yield up to the emperor one of those golden and visionary days! MILTON would not desist from proceeding with one of his works, although warned by the physician of the certain loss of his sight. He declared he preferred his duty to his eyes, and doubtless his fame to his comfort. ANTHONY WOOD, to preserve the lives of others, voluntarily resigned his own to cloistered studies; nor did the literary passion desert him in his last moments, when with his dying hands the hermit of literature still grasped his beloved papers, and his last mortal thoughts dwelt on his "Athenae Oxonienses." MORERI, the founder of our great biographical collections, conceived the design with such enthusiasm, and found such seduction in the labour, that he willingly withdrew from the popular celebrity he had acquired as a preacher, and the preferment which a minister of state, in whose house he resided, would have opened to his views.[A] After the first edition of his "Historical Dictionary," he had nothing so much at heart as its improvement. His unyielding application was converting labour into death; but collecting his last renovated vigour, with his dying hands he gave the volume to the world, though he did not live to witness even its publication. All objects in life appeared mean to him, compared with that exalted delight of addressing, to the literary men of his age, the history of their brothers. Such are the men, as BACON says of himself, who are "the servants of posterity,"—