of Tempe. Such was the influence of
the ideal presence; and barren will be his imagination, and luckless his
fortune, who, claiming the honours of genius, has never been touched by
such a temporary delirium.

To this enthusiasm, and to this alone, can we attribute the
self-immolation of men of genius. Mighty and laborious works have been
pursued, as a forlorn hope, at the certain destruction of the fortune of
the individual. Vast labours attest the enthusiasm which accompanied their
progress. Such men have sealed their works with their blood: they have
silently borne the pangs of disease; they have barred themselves from the
pursuits of fortune; they have torn themselves away from all they loved in
life, patiently suffering these self-denials, to escape from interruptions
and impediments to their studies. Martyrs of literature and art, they
behold in their solitude the halo of immortality over their studious
heads--that fame which is "a life beyond life." VAN HELMONT, in his
library and his laboratory, preferred their busy solitude to the honours
and the invitations of Rodolphus II., there writing down what he daily
experienced during thirty years; nor would the enthusiast yield up to the
emperor one of those golden and visionary days! MILTON would not desist
from proceeding with one of his works, although warned by the physician of
the certain loss of his sight. He declared he preferred his duty to his
eyes, and doubtless his fame to his comfort. ANTHONY WOOD, to preserve the
lives of others, voluntarily resigned his own to cloistered studies; nor
did the literary passion desert him in his last moments, when with his
dying hands the hermit of literature still grasped his beloved papers, and
his last mortal thoughts dwelt on his "Athenae Oxonienses." MORERI, the
founder of our great biographical collections, conceived the design with
such enthusiasm, and found such seduction in the labour, that he willingly
withdrew from the popular celebrity he had acquired as a preacher, and the
preferment which a minister of state, in whose house he resided, would
have opened to his views.[A] After the first edition of his "Historical
Dictionary," he had nothing so much at heart as its improvement. His
unyielding application was converting labour into death; but collecting
his last renovated vigour, with his dying hands he gave the volume to the
world, though he did not live to witness even its publication. All objects
in life appear