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 Proso-popeia 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 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 sounds from the bottom of his breast." The
tremulous figures of the ancient Sibyl appear to have been viewed in the
land of the Muses, by the energetic description which Paulus Jovius gives
us of the impetus and afflatus of one of the Italian improvvisatori, 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
eyes 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 ear, as it were, abstracted and intent, moderates
each impulse of his flowing numbers."[A]

[Footnote A: The passage is curious:--"Canenti defixi exardent oculi,
sudores manant, frontis venae contumescunt, et quod mirum est, eruditae
aures, tanquam alienae et intentae, omnem impetum profluentium numerorum
exactissima ratione moderantur."]

This enthusiasm throws the man of genius amid Nature i