tention to an exterior object, and bring us back to the world, which we
had, as it were, left behind us. The circumstance is sufficiently
familiar; as well as another; that whenever we are absorbed in profound
contemplation, a startling noise scatters the spirits, and painfully
agitates the whole frame. The nerves are then in a state of the utmost
relaxation. There may be an agony in thought which only deep thinkers
experience. The terrible effect of metaphysical studies on BEATTIE has
been told by himself. "Since the 'Essay on Truth' was printed in quarto, I
have never _dared_ to read it over. I durst not even read the sheets to
see whether there were any errors in the print, and was obliged to get a
friend to do that office for me. These studies came in time to have
dreadful effects upon my nervous system; and I cannot read what I then
wrote without some degree of horror, because it recalls to my mind the
horrors that I have sometimes felt after passing a long evening in those
severe studies."

GOLDONI, after a rash exertion of writing sixteen plays in a year,
confesses he paid the penalty of the folly. He flew to Genoa, leading a
life of delicious vacuity. To pass the day without doing anything, was all
the enjoyment he was now capable of feeling. But long after he said, "I
felt at that time, and have ever since continued to feel, the consequence
of that exhaustion of spirits I sustained in composing my sixteen
comedies."

The enthusiasm of study was experienced by POPE in his self-education, and
once it clouded over his fine intellect. It was the severity of his
application which distorted his body; and he then partook of a calamity
incidental to the family of genius, for he sunk into that state of
exhaustion which SMOLLETT experienced during half a year, called a _coma
vigil,_ an affection of the brain, where the principle of life is so
reduced, that all external objects appear to be passing in a dream.
BOERHAAVE has related of himself, that having imprudently indulged in
intense thought on a particular subject, he did not close his eyes for six
weeks after; and TISSOT, in his work on the health of men of letters,
abounds in similar cases, where a complete stupor has affected the unhappy
student for a period of six months.

Assuredly the finest geniuses have not always the power to withdraw
themselves from that intensely interesting train of ideas, which we have
shown has not been removed from about them by even