ersation.--And not only too, is the necessity of
commerce with other minds less felt by such persons, but, from that
fastidiousness which the opulence of their own resources generates, the
society of those less gifted than themselves becomes often a restraint
and burden, to which not all the charms of friendship, or even love, can
reconcile them. "Nothing is so tiresome (says the poet of Vaucluse, in
assigning a reason for not living with some of his dearest friends) as
to converse with persons who have not the same information as one's
self."

But it is the cultivation and exercise of the imaginative faculty that,
more than any thing, tends to wean the man of genius from actual life,
and, by substituting the sensibilities of the imagination for those of
the heart, to render, at last, the medium through which he feels no less
unreal than that through which he thinks. Those images of ideal good and
beauty that surround him in his musings soon accustom him to consider
all that is beneath this high standard unworthy of his care; till, at
length, the heart becoming chilled as the fancy warms, it too often
happens that, in proportion as he has refined and elevated his theory of
all the social affections, he has unfitted himself for the practice of
them.[52] Hence so frequently it arises that, in persons of this
temperament, we see some bright but artificial idol of the brain usurp
the place of all real and natural objects of tenderness. The poet Dante,
a wanderer away from wife and children, passed the whole of a restless
and detached life in nursing his immortal dream of Beatrice; while
Petrarch, who would not suffer his only daughter to reside beneath his
roof, expended thirty-two years of poetry and passion on an idealised
love.

It is, indeed, in the very nature and essence of genius to be for ever
occupied intensely with Self, as the great centre and source of its
strength. Like the sister Rachel, in Dante, sitting all day before her
mirror,

"mai non si smaga
Del suo ammiraglio, e siede tutto giorno."

To this power of self-concentration, by which alone all the other powers
of genius are made available, there is, of course, no such disturbing
and fatal enemy as those sympathies and affections that draw the mind
out actively towards others[53]; and, accordingly, it will be found
that, among those who have felt within themselves a call to immortality,
the greater number have, by a sort of instinct, kept al