Stopping under an oak, he wrote with a pencil the Proso-popeia of Fabricius.

"I still remember my solitary transport at the discovery of a philosophical argument against the doctrine of transubstantiation," exclaimed GIBBON in his Memoirs.
This quick sensibility of genius has suppressed the voice of poets in reciting their most pathetic passages.

THOMSON was so oppressed by a passage in Virgil or Milton when he attempted to read, that "his voice sunk in ill-articulated sounds from the bottom of his breast." The tremulous figures of the ancient Sibyl appear to have been viewed in the land of the Muses, by the energetic description which Paulus Jovius gives us of the impetus and afflatus of one of the Italian improvvisatori, some of whom, I have heard from one present at a similar exhibition, have not degenerated in poetic inspiration, nor in its corporeal excitement.

"His eyes fixed downwards, kindle as he gives utterance to his effusions, the moist drops flow down his cheeks, the veins of his forehead swell, and wonderfully his learned ear, as it were, abstracted and intent, moderates each impulse of his flowing numbers."[A] [Footnote A: The passage is curious:--"Canenti defixi exardent oculi, sudores manant, frontis venae contumescunt, et quod mirum est, eruditae aures, tanquam alienae et intentae, omnem impetum profluentium numerorum exactissima ratione moderantur."] This enthusiasm throws the man of genius amid Nature into absorbing reveries when the senses of other men are overcome at the appearance of destruction; he continues to view only Nature herself.

The mind of PLINY, to add one more chapter to his mighty scroll, sought Nature amidst the volcano in which he perished.