When he quitted his apartment, after prolonging his studies there, a visible alteration was observed in his person, and the agitation of his recent thoughts was still traced in his air and manner.

With eloquent truth BUFFON described those reveries of the student, which compress his day, and mark the hours by the sensations of minutes! "Invention depends on patience: contemplate your subject long; it will gradually unfold till a sort of electric spark convulses for a moment the brain, and spreads down to the very heart a glow of irritation.

Then come the luxuries of genius, the true hours for production and composition -- hours so delightful, that I have spent twelve or fourteen successively at my writing-desk, and still been in a state of pleasure." Bishop HORNE, whose literary feelings were of the most delicate and lively kind, has beautifully recorded them in his progress through a favourite and lengthened work--his Commentary on the Psalms.

He alludes to himself in the third person; yet who but the self-painter could have caught those delicious emotions which are so evanescent in the deep occupation of pleasant studies?
"He arose fresh in the morning to his task; the silence of the night invited him to pursue it; and he can truly say, that food and rest were not preferred before it.

Every part improved infinitely upon his acquaintance with it, and no one gave him uneasiness but the last, for then he grieved that his work was done." This eager delight of pursuing study, this impatience of interruption, and this exultation in progress, are alike finely described by MILTON in a letter to his friend Diodati.
"Such is the character of my mind, that no delay, none of the ordinary cessations for rest or otherwise, I had nearly said care or thinking of the very subject, can hold me back from being hurried on to the destined point, and from completing the great circuit, as it were, of the study in which I am engaged." Such is the picture of genius viewed in the stillness of MEDITATION; but there is yet a more excited state, when, as if consciousness were mixing with its reveries, in the allusion of a scene, of a person, of a passion, the emotions of the soul affect even the organs of sense.