This rapture, or sensation of deep study, has been described by one whose imagination had strayed into the occult learning of antiquity, and in the hymns of Orpheus it seemed to him that he had lifted the veil from Nature.

His feelings were associated with her loneliness.

I translate his words:--"When I took these dark mystical hymns into my hands, I appeared as it were to be descending into an abyss of the mysteries of venerable antiquity; at that moment, the world in silence and the stars and moon only, watching me." This enthusiasm is confirmed by Mr.
Mathias, who applies this description to his own emotions on his first opening the manuscript volumes of the poet Gray on the philosophy of Plato; "and many a learned man," he adds, "will acknowledge as his own the feelings of this animated scholar." Amidst the monuments of great and departed nations, our Imagination is touched by the grandeur of local impressions, and the vivid associations, or suggestions, of the manners, the arts, and the individuals, of a great people.

The classical author of Anacharsis, when in Italy, would often stop as if overcome by his recollections.

Amid camps, temples, circuses, hippodromes, and public and private edifices, he, as it were, held an interior converse with the manes of those who seemed hovering about the capital of the old world; as if he had been a citizen of ancient Rome travelling in the modern.