ight 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 Pe