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 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 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 selfpainter 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 com

pleting 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 illusion 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 master-pieces. 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 journées délicieuses, errant sans souci, sans projet, sans affaire, de bois en bois, et de rocher en rocher, révant toujours et ne pensant point." Far different, however, is one closely

pursued act of meditation, carrying the enthusiast faculty, or the ideal presence, vying with that of 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 *.

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 BERKLEY. "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 * The late Mrs. SIDDONS. She herself communicated this striking circumstance to me.

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 em-
bracing 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 compre-
hended; 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."

46

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 but these tremors were not unusual with him— delights of those elements which he was creating; for in the preface to his Tales, he tells us, that his nerves moved with the images which excited" in translating Homer he found greater pleasure 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 movable 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! 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.

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 æstus. "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 Shakespeare'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!"

and countenance.

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 his friend started at the disordered appearance of act of his "Olympiad," found himself suddenly the bard, whose orgasm had disturbed his very air 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 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 †, which, as he confessed, he had pursued without the power of quitting it;

have.

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 Tasso :-"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 Alluding to the recorded in his own words. 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

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, rapidity of the thoughts, and the glow and the expres + This famous and unparalleled ode was probably after-siveness of the images; which are the certain marks of wards retouched; but Joseph Warton discovered in it the the first sketch of a master.

THE RAPTURE OF DEEP STUDY IN ART, SCIENCE, AND LITERATURE.

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."

425

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 The effect which the study of Plutarch's Illus- sounds from the bottom of his breast." The trious Men produced on the mighty mind of tremulous figures of the ancient Sibyl appear to ALFIERI, during a whole winter, while he lived as have been viewed in the land of the Muses, by it were among the heroes of antiquity, he has the energetic description which Paulus Jovius himself described. ALFIERI wept and raved with gives us, of the impetus and afflatus of one of grief and indignation that he was born under a the Italian improvvisatori, some of whom, I have government, which favoured no Roman heroes heard from one present at a similar exhibition, and sages. As often as he was struck with the have not degenerated in poetic inspiration, nor in great deeds of these great men, in his extreme its corporeal excitement. "His eyes fixed downagitation he rose from his seat as one possessed. wards, kindle, as he gives utterance to his effuThe feeling of genius in ALFIERI was suppressed sions, the moist drops flow down his cheeks, the for more than twenty years, by the discourage- veins of his forehead swell, and wonderfully his ment of his uncle: but as the natural tempera- learned ear, as it were, abstracted and intent, ment cannot be crushed out of the soul of genius, moderates each impulse of his flowing numbers.*"' he was a poet without writing a single verse; and This enthusiasm throws the man of genius amid as a great poet, the ideal presence at times became Nature, into absorbing reveries when the senses ungovernable, verging to madness. In traversing of other men are overcome at the appearance of the wilds of Arragon his emotions would certainly destruction; he continues to view only Nature 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 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

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. 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

The passage is curious.-Canenti defixi exardent

oculi, sudores manant, frontis venæ contumescunt, et quod mirum est, eruditæ aures, tanquam alienæ et intentæ, omnem impetum profluentium numerorum exactissimâ ratione moderantur."

learned man," he adds, "will acknowledge as his some fragments of bones, which could not belong own, the feelings of this animated scholar."

to any known class of the animal kingdom. The Amidst the monuments of great and departed philosopher dwelt on these animal ruins till he nations, our imagination is touched by the grandeur constructed numerous species which had disapof local impressions, and the vivid associations, peared from the globe. This sublime naturalist or suggestions, of the manners, the arts, and the has ascertained and classified the fossil remains of individuals, of a great people. The classical author animals whose existence can no longer be traced of Anacharsis, when in Italy, would often stop as in the records of mankind. His own language if overcome by his recollections. Amid camps, bears testimony to the imagination which carried temples, circuses, hippodromes, and public and him on through a career so strange and wonderful. private edifices, he, as it were, held an interior" It is a rational object of ambition in the mind converse with the manes of those who seemed of man, to whom only a short space of time is hovering about the capital of the old world; as if allotted upon earth, to have the glory of restoring he had been a citizen of ancient Rome, travelling the history of thousands of ages which preceded in the modern. So men of genius have roved the existence of his race, and of thousands of amid the awful ruins till the ideal presence has animals that never were contemporaneous with fondly built up the city anew, and have become his species." Philosophy becomes poetry, and Romans in the Rome of two thousand years past. science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius. POMPONIUS LÆTUS, who devoted his life to this Even in the practical part of a science, painful to study, was constantly seen wandering amidst the the operator himself, Mr. Abernethy has declared, vestiges of this "throne of the world." There, and eloquently declared, that this enthusiasm is in many a reverie, as his eye rested on the mutilated absolutely requisite. "We have need of enthusiasm, arch and the broken column, abstracted and or some strong incentive, to induce us to spend immovable, he dropped tears in the ideal presence our nights in study, and our days in the disgustof Rome and of the Romans. Another enthusiast ing and health-destroying observation of human of this class was Bosius, who sought beneath diseases, which alone can enable us to understand, Rome for another Rome, in those catacombs built alleviate, or remove them. On no other terms by the early Christians, for their asylum and their can we be considered as real students of our sepulchre. His work of "Roma Sotteranea" is profession-to confer that which sick kings would the production of a subterraneous life, passed in fondly purchase with their diadem-that which fervent and perilous labours. Taking with him wealth cannot purchase, nor state nor rank a hermit's meal for the week, this new Pliny often bestow-to alleviate the most insupportable of descended into the bowels of the earth, by lamp- human afflictions." Such is the enthusiasm of light, clearing away the sand and ruins till a tomb the physiologist of genius, who elevates the broke forth, or an inscription became legible. demonstrations of anatomical inquiries by the Accompanied by some friend whom his enthusiasm cultivation of the intellectual faculties, connecting had inspired with his own sympathy, here he "man with the common Master of the universe." 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.

The same enthusiasm surrounds the world of science with that creating 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

This enthusiasm inconceivably fills the mind of genius in all great and solemn operations. It is an agitation amidst calmness, and is required not 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