It was this power that enabled him to arrange the whole of a treatise in his thoughts before he committed a single idea to paper.

In the exercise of this power, he was known occasionally to have passed a whole night or day, entirely inattentive to surrounding objects." There is nothing incredible in the stories related of some who have experienced this entranced state in study, where the mind, deliciously inebriated with the object it contemplates, feels nothing, from the excess of feeling, as a philosopher well describes it.

The impressions from our exterior sensations are often suspended by great mental excitement.
ARCHIMEDES, involved in the investigation of mathematical truth, and the painters PROTOGENES and PARMEGIANO, found their senses locked up as it were in meditation, so as to be incapable of withdrawing themselves from their work, even in the midst of the terrors and storming of the place by the enemy.

MARINO was so absorbed in the composition of his "Adonis," that he suffered his leg to be burned before the painful sensation grew stronger than the intellectual pleasure of his imagination.

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.