it resembles,' said he a tradesman taking stock; without which, he never knows either what he possesses, or in what he is deficient.' Industry is the feature by which the ancients so frequently describe an eminent character; such phrases as 'incredibili industria; diligentia singulari, are usual. When we reflect on the magnitude of the labours of Cicero, Erasmus, Gesner, Baronius, Lord Bacon, Usher, and Bayle, we seem asleep at the base of these monuments of study, and scarcely awaken to admire. Such are the laborious instructions of mankind! Nor let 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; 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 thastery of manner, which holiday writers, even with ten times his genius, may vainly attempt to equal.' Even in the sublime efforts of imagi nation, 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. three operations, I proceed like other authors, to polish, correct or amend.' After these 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, opposite the traveller, afar from him, 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, and in these vivid reveries, we are converted into spectators. A great poetical contemporary of our country does not think that even his dreams should pass away unnoticed, and keeps, what he calls, a register of nocturnals, The historian De Thou was one of those great literary characters, who, all his life, was preparing to write the history which he wrote; 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 dreamus. 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, in Germany, and in England, where he saw and consulted the learned, and examined their curious libraries; he had all his life time these literary dreams, but more particularly when in his travels, he thus repeated the images of the day. If memory does not chain down these hurrying, fading children of the imagination, and Snatch the faithless fugitives to light," Pleasures of Memory. with the beams of the morning, the mind suddenly finds itself forsaken and solitary. 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 papers, 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. Few works of magnitude presented themselves at once, in their extent and their associations to their authors; the man of genius perceives not more than two or three striking circumstances, unobserved by another; in revolving the subject, the whole mind is gradually agitated; it is a summer landscape, at the break of day, wrapt in mist, where the sun strikes on a single object, till the light and warmth increasing, all starts up in the noon-day 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.' Winckelman 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 Abbé De Lille, his specimens pleased, and sketches heaped on sketches, produced 'Les Jardins.' In writing the Pleasures of Memory,' 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. And thus it happened with the Rape of the Lock, and many celebrated productions. 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 these studies' as they are called, are as precious to posterity, as their more complete designs. 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.* 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; but we must recollect there is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking. This 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, and wise amidst distraction and folly. 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, as Rodney at the table of Lord Sandwich, while the bottle was briskly circulating, was observed arranging bits of cork; his solitary amusement having excited an inquiry, he said that he was practising a plan how to annihilate an enemy's fleet; this afterwards proved to be that discovery of breaking the line, which the happy audacity of the hero executed. Thus Hogarth, with an eye always awake to the ridicu lous, would catch a character on his thumb-nail; Leonardo da Vinci could detect in the stains of an old weatherbeaten wall, the landscapes of nature, and Haydn carefully noted down in a pocket book, the passages and ideas which came to him in his walks, or amidst company. To this habit of continuity of attention, tracing the first simple idea through its remoter consequences, Galileo and Newton owed many of their 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 ordi *This anecdote is found in Ruff head's life of Pope, evidently given by Warburton, as was every thing of personal knowledge in that tasteless volume of a mere lawyer, writing the life of a poet. nary 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 being struck by the fall of an apple, could have discovered a new quality in matter by the system of gravitation; or have imagined, while viewing boys blowing soap-bladders, the properties of light, and then anatomised a ray! It was the same principle which led Franklin when on board a ship, observing a partial stillness in the waves, when they threw down water which had been used for culinary purposes, 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 simple meditation of genius. In 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, on Old Age, we find Cato admiring that 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 has remained a whole day in immove. able 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 every thing 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; and when once deeply engaged in reading he seemed to live only in his ideas. The poet went to view a public procession, and having entered a bookseller's shop, taking up a book he sunk into a reverie; on his return he declared that he had neither seen nor heard a single occurrence in public exhibition which had passed 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. There is nothing incredible in the stories related of some who have experienced this entranced state, in a very extraordinary degree; that ecstacy 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 :-Archimedes, involved in the investigation of mathematical truth, and the painters Protogenes and Parmeggiano, 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 burnt for some time before the pain grew stronger than the intellectual pleasure of his imagination. Thomas, 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 what eloquent truth has Buffon described those reveries of the student, which compress his day, and mark the hours by the sensations of minutes. Invention,' he says, '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.' This eager delight of pursuing his study, and this impatience of interruption in the pursuit, are finely described by Milton in a letter to his friend Deodati. Such is the character of my mind, that no delay, none of the ordinary cessations (for rest or otherwise) no, 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, a person, a passion, the emotions of the soul affect even the organs of sense. It is experienced in the moments the man of genius is producing; these are the hours of inspiration, and this is the gende enthusiasm of genius! CHAPTER VIII. THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. A state of mind occurs in the most active operations of genius, which the term reverie inadequately indicates; metaphysical distinctions but ill describe it, and popular lan guage affords no terms for those faculties and feelings which escape the observation of the multitude who are not af fected by the phenomenon. The illusion of a drama, over persons of great sensibili ty, where all the senses are excited by a mixture of reality with imagination, is 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 a sort of real existences appear to rise up before them, they perceive themselves spectators or actors, feel their sympathies excited, and involun tarily use language and gestures, while the exterior organs of sense are visibly affected; not that they are spectators and actors, nor that the scene exists. In this equivocal state, the enthusiast of genius produces his master-pieces. This waking dream is distinct from reverie, where our thoughts wandering without connection, the faint impres sions are so evanescent as to occur without even being recollected. Not so when one closely pursued act of medi tation carries the enthusiast of genius beyond the precinct of actual existence, while this act of contemplation makes the thing contemplated. He is now the busy painter of a world which he himself only views; aloue he hears, he sees, he touches, he laughs and weeps; his brows and aps, 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. Quintilian has nobly compared them to the lashings of the hon's tai preparing to combat. Even actors of genius have accus tomed themselves to walk on the stage for an hour before the curtain was drawn, to fill their minds with all the phan toms of the drama, to personify, to catch the passion, to speak to others, to do all that a man of genius would have viewed in the subject. 4 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 it the ideal presence, to distinguish it from the real presence of things; it has been called the representative faculty, the imaginative state, &c. Call it what we will, no term opens to us the invisible mode of its operations, or 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 of any actual thing and its image in a glass perplexed some philosophers? And it is well known how far the ideal philosophy has been carried. All are pictures, alike painted on the retina, or optical sensorium" esclaimed the enthusiast Barry, who only saw pictures m nature and nature in pictures. 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 pre sence; yet it is a real one to the enthusiast of genius, and it is his happiest and peculiar conditionwithout this power no metaphysical aid, no art to be taught him, no mastery of talent shall avail him; unblest with it the votary shall find each sacrifice lying cold on the altar, for no accepting flame from heaven shall kindle it. *Meum sic est ingenium, nulla ut mora, nulla quies, rafla ferme illius rei cura aut cogitatio distineat, quoad pervadin quo feror, et grandem aliquem studiorum meorum quasi pefi, odum conficiam. 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; and to trace this invisible operation, this warmth on the nerve, were to search for the principle of life which found would cease to be life. There is, however, something of reality in this state of the ideal presence; for the most familiar instances show that 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. Thus the exterior senses are more concerned in the ideal world than at first appears; we thrill at even the idea of any thing that makes us shudder, and only imagining it often produces a real pain. A curious consequence flows from this principle: Milton, lingering amidst the freshness of nature in Eden, felt all the delights of those elements with 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 have often been startled by its horrors, and often left his bitter and gloomy spirit in the stings he inflicted on the great criminal. The moving 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, like Nature, open a volume large as life itself-embracing a circuit of human existence! 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 inspired real tears; and thev 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. 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. The tremors of Dryden, after having written an ode, a circumstance accidentally preserved, 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.' We find Metastasio, like others of the brotherhood, susceptible of this state, complaining of his sufferings during the poetical estus. 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,' as we are told by Mr Mathias. 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, till he recovered himself. Listen to one labouring with all the magic of the spell. Madam Roland has thus powerfully described the ideal presence in her first readings of Telemachus and Tasso: My respiration rose, I felt a rapid fire colouring my face and my voice changing had 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 frutom a circumstantial scene in Richardson. betrayed my agitation. I was Eucharis for Telemacus, and Erminia for Tancred. However, during this perfect transformation, I did not yet think that I myself was any thing, for any one: the whole had no connection with myself. I sought for nothing around me; I was them; I saw only the objects which existed for them; it was a dream, without being awakened.' 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 told. Alfieri wept and raved with grief and indignation that he was born under a government which favoured no Roman heroes nor sages; as often as he was struck with the great actions of these great men, in his extreme agitation he rose from his seat like 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 and verging to madness. In traversing the wilds of Arragon, his emotions, he says, 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 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 soul of genius, has agitated the frame convulsively; it comes like a whispered secret from Nature. When Mallebranche 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 Prosopopeia 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 voices 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 figure of the ancient Sybil appears to have been viewed in that land of the Muses, by the energetic description of Paulus Jovius of the impetus and afflatus of one of the Italian improvisatori, 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 eves 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 ears as it were, abstracted and intent, moderate each impulse o. his flowing numbers.'* This enthusiasm throws the man of genius into those reveries where, amidst Nature, while others are terrified at destruction, he can only view Nature herself. The mind of Pliny, to add one more chapter to his mighty scroll, sought her amidst the volcano in which he perished. Verand all hope was given up: the astonished captain beheld net was on board a ship in the midst of a raging tempest, 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. There is a tender enthusiasm in the elevated studies of antiquity, in which the ideal presence or the imaginative existence is seen prevailing over the mind. It is finely said by Livy, that in contemplating antiquity, the mind * The passage is curious.-Canenti defixi exardent oculi, sudores manant, frontis venæ contumescunt, et quod mirum est eruditæ aures tanquam alienæ et intenta omnem impetum profluentium numerorum exactissima ratione moderantur.' itself becomes antique.' Amidst the monuments of great and departed nations, our imagination is touched by the grandeur of local impressions, and the vivid associations of the manners, the arts, and the individuals of a great people. Men of genius have roved amidst 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. Pomponius Lætus, 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, he stopped to muse, and dropt tears in the ideal presence of Rome and of the Romans. 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 sepulchres. 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 lamplight, clearing away the sand and ruins, till some tomb broke forth, or some 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, amidst 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. Werner, the mineralogist, celebrated for his lectures, by some accounts transmitted by his auditors, appears 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. the horrors that I have sometimes felt after passing a long evening in those severe studies.' Goldoni, after a resh exertion of writing sixteen plays in a year, confessess ho paid the penalty of the folly; he flew to Genoa, leading a life of delicious vacuity; to pass the day without doing any thing, 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.' Boerhaave has related of himself, that having imprudently indulged in intenee 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 could not always 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: the scenical illusion,-the being of their passion,-the invisi ble existences repeatedly endowed by them with a vital force, have still hung before their eyes. It was in this state that 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 to wards him on the beams of the sun and thus, Mallebranche listening to the voice of God within him: or Lord Herbert on his knees, in the stillness of the sky; or Paschal starting at times at an abyss opening by his side. Descartes, when young, and in a country seclusion, bis 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; he never doubted the vision; and this dream in the delirium 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 converted them into visionaries; and their illusions were as strong as Swedenburgh's, who saw hearen on earth in the glittering streets of his New Jerusalem, and Cardan's, when he so carefully observed a number of little armed men at his feet; and Benvenuto Cellini, whose vivid imagination and glorions egotism so frequently con templateda resplendent light hovering over his shadow.' Yet what less than enthusiasm is the purchase price of been a man of genius of this rare cast, who has not be high passion and invention? Perhaps never has there trayed early in youth the ebullitions of the imagination in some outward action at that period, when the illusions of life are more real to them than its realities. A slight des rangement 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 knows nothing of the baseness of mankind, unsatis It is this enthusiasm which inconceivably fills the mind of genius in all great and solemn operations: it is an agitation in calmness, and is required not only in the fine arts, but wherever a great and continued exertion of the soul must be employed. It was experienced by De Thou, the historian, when after his morning prayers he always added another to implore 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 by Haydn, when 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. It 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 leap-fied, and raging with a devouring eagerness for the aliment ing, he retires back 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 phrenzy, was necessary to qualify a man for that place; and Nelson, decorated by all his honours about him, on the day of battle, at the sight of those emblems of glory emulated himself. Thus enthusiasm was necessary and effective for his genius. 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, in a sound mind, of withdrawing from the ideal world into the world of It is but a step which carries us from the wanderings of fancy into the aberrations of delirium. sense. With curious art the brain too finely wrought Churchill. There may be an agony in thought which only deep thinkers experience. The terrible effects 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 terrors 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 charm the world, or make it happier. To this enthusiasm, and to this alone, can we attribute the self-immolation of men of genius. Mighty and labo rious works have been pursued, as a forlorn hope, at the certain destruction of the fortune of the individual. The fate of Castell's Lexicon, of Bloch's magnificent work an * Castell lost 12000. by this great work; and gave away copies, while the rest rotted at home. He exhibits a unions picture of literary labour in his preface- As for myself, I have been unceasingly neempied for such a number of meers it were a holiday in which I have not laboured su much as in this mass-Molendino he calls them-that day seemed as Fishes, and other great and similar labours, attest the en- • Twas thine own genius gave the fatal blow, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Thus comes the shadow of death among those who are eristing with more than life about them. Yet there is no celebrity for the artist,' said Gesner, if the love of his own heart does not become a vehement passion; if the hours he emplove to cultivate it are not for him the most delicious ones of his life; if study becomes not his true existence and his first hanoiness; if the society of his brothers in art is not that which most pleases him; if even in the nighttime the ideas of his art do not occupy his vigils or his dreama; if in the morning he flies not to his work with a airteen or eighteen hours in these enlarging Lexicons and Polyglot Bibles. Bloch expended all his fortune in his splendid work. • See Calamities of Authors, Vol. I, p. 243 new rapture. These are the marks of him who labours for true glory and posterity; but if he seek only to please the taste of his age, his works will not kindle the desires nor touch the hearts of those who love the arts and the artists.' Unaccompanied by enthusiasm, genius will produce nothing but uninteresting works of art; not a work of art, resembling the dove of Archidas, which other artists beheld flying, but could not make another dove to meet it in the air. Enthusiasm is the secret spirit which hovers over the production of genius throwing the reader of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into the very ideal presence whence these works have really originated. A great work always leaves us in a state of musing. CHAPTER IX. LITERARY JEALOUSY. Jealousy, long declared to be the offspring of little minds, is not, however, restricted to them; it fiercely rages in the literary republic, among the Senate and the Order of Knights, as well as the people. In that curious selfdescription which Linnæus comprised in a single page, written with the precision of a naturalist, that great man discovered that his constitution was liable to be afflicted with jealousy. Literary jealousy seems often proportioned to the degree of genius; the shadowy and equivocal claims of literary honour is the real cause of this terrible fear; in cases where the object is more palpable and definite, and the pre-eminence is more universal, than intellectual excellence can be, jealousy will not so strongly affect the claimant for our admiration. The most beautiful woman, in the age of beauty, will be rarely jealous: seldom she encounters a rival; and while her claims exist, who can contend with a fine feature or a dissolving glance? But a man of genius has no other existence than in the opinion of the world; a divided empire would obscure him, a contested one might annihilate him. The lives of authors and artists exhibit a most painful disease in that jealousy which is the perpetual fever of their existence. Why does Plato never mention Zenophon, and why does Zenophon inveigh against Plato, studiously collecting every little report which may detract from his fame? They wrote on the same subject! Why did Corneille, tottering on the grave, when Racine consulted him on his first tragedy, advise the author never to write another? Why does Voltaire continually detract from the sublimity of Corneille, the sweetness of Racine, and the fire of Crebillon? Why, when Boccaccio sent to Petrarch a copy of Dante, declaring that the work was like a first light which had illuminated his mind, did Petrarch coldly observe that he had not been anxious to inquire after it, having intended to compose in the vernacular idiom and not wishing to be considered as a plagiary; while he only allows Dante's superiority from having written in the vulgar idiom, which he did not think was an enviable, but an inferior merit. Thus frigidly Petrarch took the altitude of the solitary Etna before him, in the 'Inferno,' while he shrunk into himself with the painful consciousness of the existence of another poet, who obscured his own solitary majesty. Why is Waller silent on the merits of Cowley, and why does he not give one verse to return the praise with which Dryden honoured him, while he is warm in panegyric on Beaumont and Fletcher, on Sandys, Ware, and D'Avenant? Because of some of these their species of composition was different from his own, and the rest he could not fear. The moral feeling has often been found too weak to temper the malignancy of literary jealousy, and has led some men of genius to an incredible excess. A memorable and recent example offers in the history of the two brothers, Dr William, and John Hunter both great characters, fitted to be rivals, but Nature, it was imagined, in the tenderness of blood had placed a bar to rivalry. John, without any determined pursuit in his youth, was received by his brother at the height of his celebrity; the Doctor initiated him into his school; they performed their experiments together; and William Hunter was the first to announce to the world the great genius of his brother. After this close connection in all their studies and discoveries, Dr William Hunter published his magnificent work-the proud favourite of his heart, the assertor of his fame. Was it credible that the genius of the celebrated anatomist, which had been nursed under the wing of his brother, should turn on that wing to clip it? John Hun |