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 sens