ears
marvellous to volatile spirits, and puny thinkers.

To this patient habit, Newton is indebted for many of his great
discoveries; an apple falls upon him in his orchard,--and the system of
attraction succeeds in his mind! he observes boys blowing soap bubbles,
and the properties of light display themselves! Of Socrates, it is said,
that he would frequently remain an entire day and night in the same
attitude, absorbed in meditation; and why should we doubt this, when we
know that La Fontaine and Thomson, Descartes and Newton, experienced the
same abstraction? Mercator, the celebrated geographer, found such
delight in the ceaseless progression of his studies, that he would never
willingly quit his maps to take the necessary refreshments of life. In
Cicero's Treatise on Old Age, Cato applauds 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. Buffon once described these delicious moments with his
accustomed eloquence:--"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 and fourteen successively at my writing-desk, and still been in a
state of pleasure." The anecdote related of Marini, the Italian poet,
may be true. Once absorbed in revising his Adonis, he suffered his leg
to be burnt for some time, without any sensation.

Abstraction of this sublime kind is the first step to that noble
enthusiasm which accompanies Genius; it produces those raptures and that
intense delight, which some curious facts will explain to us.

Poggius relates of Dante, that he indulged his meditations more strongly
than any man he knew! whenever he read, he was only alive to what was
passing in his mind; to all human concerns, he was as if they had not
been! Dante went one day to a great public procession; he entered the
shop of a bookseller to be a spectator of the passing show. He found a
book which greatly interested him; he devoured it in silence, and
plunged into an abyss of thought. On his return he declared that he had
neither seen, nor heard, the slightest occurrence of the public
exhibition which had passed before him. This enthu