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which await the man of cultivated, mental refinement-knows nothing, it is true, of the pleasures here imagined. The enjoyments produced by mental abstraction and association, are, to him "like a tale told by an idiot," which, if it " signifies" any thing but folly, is of so recondite and equivocal a nature as to be unintelligible to minds unsophisticated by the dreams of absolute enthusiasm. These and a thousand others, all differing it may chance from each other in certain shades of temperament, pass through life, who never framed to themselves the possibility of the enjoyments here spoken of.

Multitudes who have enjoyed the benefit of education, who have sustained a character of high respectability in the several ways in which they have shone, would yet, it is more than probable, confess, were the question asked, that "the noiseless tenor of their way," was accompanied with gratifications as high as those which attended the hours of persons who have attained high eminence in literature, and who are famed for their intervals of abstraction. "The Miser himself," says Professor Ferguson, in his Essay on the History of Civil Society, "can consider his wealth as the source of happiness, and has challenged his heir to have more pleasure in spending than he in amassing, his fortune."

Why," says the Doctor, whose speculations On Happiness" indicate a deep insight into human nature, "may not the man whose object is money, be understood to live a life of pleasure, not only more entire than that of the spendthrift, but even as much as the virtuoso, the scholar, or the man of taste."

What is there, indeed, it will be asked by the calculating individual, to invalidate the hypothesis that a person, whose senses are utterly deaf to the calls of literary speculations, may tread the journey of life, may descend into the vale of years, and experience in as high a degree the emotions of pleasure and of happiness as the first? The sportsman and the tradesman feel the keen delights of their several pursuits, as the Poet in his "frenzied" reveries, or as the Philosopher lost in a train of favourite abstraction.

The question, indeed, is one which

cannot, from its very nature, admit of absolute demonstration; any thing in the shape of mathematical proof is here entirely out of the question; these are matters in which it is agreed on all hands that much is to be felt and understood.

A mind that, by a course of reading and reflection, has become so far initiated as to know from its own exercises, the nature, character, and complexion, and can consequently appreciate these pleasures, will easily credit them to exist amongst certain others in a degree far beyond their own private experience. While he judges from analogies of the intenseness with which they may exist, he is sensible that it is altogether vain to endeavour to implant an idea of their reality in the breast of a person whose imagination is barren, whose energies are torpid and cold, and whose exclusions of thought seldom, unless in the calculations of private interest, take their flight beyond the ephemeral pursuits in which they are actually engaged.

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Surrounded, for instance, with the circumstances, or with the objects which originated the train of thought in which I had engaged,-when all Nature concurred to exhilarate the soul with lively gratitude, and raise it to inspiration, when earth and air teems with fragrance and animation, and when gladness smiles upon the face of the country, variegated in the most beautiful forms, one of the class last pointed at would merely observe that it was a fine morning, whilst one of the former would probably feel the kindred energies of his soul expand under a sense of beauty, and his thoughts drawn forth in reverie. The latter would indeed discern a sort of beauty, so far as the colours, forms, and fragrance of the objects he views strikes upon his senses, but he remains wholly dead to any perception beyond: no ideas of harmony, congruity, and happiness, which rush through the imagination and awaken the energies of the former, would ever strike him. His ideas run, habitually, in another channel; no conception of any affinity between the sublime and the beautiful in nature, and the sympathies or the meditations of genius, as it often characterizes the human mind, enters for a moment into the calculations of a breast, which, however warmed with the benevolent dis

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page, I formed the following reverie, too wild for allegory, and too regular for a dream." The present writer will also fancy himself isolated in a situation where he recently enjoyed a train of reflections something similar to those which form the subject of the following sheets.

The sun had attained the highest verge of Cancer, and was already on its decline towards another equinox, when the "breezy call" of a morning scattering incense from a thousand springs, ordained to lure mortals from repose, guided my footsteps to a sequestered dell of trees, where I was sometimes wont to repair in order to enjoy in silence those moments which the busy commerce of the world are not always calculated to afford. The domain which here arrested my course was diversified in all the wildness and irregularity of nature. A river skirted its utmost boundary, whilst the umbrageous trees, which overhung its clear and murmuring stream, partially shaded the scenery of the more distant country, affording, however, at intervals a peep at rich pastures and woodlands beyond, undulating in picturesque forms of acclivity and vales. A range of lofty hills crowned with their summits the back-ground of the extended prospect. The grailed seat of a grotto, formed by the joint hand of nature and art, invited me to a domicile amidst objects of more than ordinary beauty.

For some moments I inhaled the balmy freshness of the morning air, mingled with the fragrance of odoriferous shrubs. The early sun beamed splendour from the east, the feathered tribes, roused from their cells by the call of morning, filled the ambient air with a song of praise; and whilst some winged their path towards the blue ether, others fluttered with an unceasing chorus of praise among the spreading foliage, painted in matchless variety by the pencil of an all-powerful and unseen artist. The dew-drops, trembling upon the slender leaf, sparkled like crystals with a thousand translucent rays, vegetation again raised her drooping head, and displayed, in rich exuberance, her treasures; every circumstance combined at once to inspire pleasure, and to excite busy thought.

Soliloquies naturally intrude upon the solitude of an individual, and,

under such circumstances, few, it is probable, could withstand the spontaneous flow of impressions and images thus excited.

While all Nature around, animated by the resplendent beams of a morning sun, sports each in his own instinctive sphere of recreation, we naturally diverge into speculations connected with the character and complexion of our intellectual susceptibilities. I here imagined the person who had long been in the habit of close mental application, whose intellectual energies have been practically trained to investigation and thought, whose susceptibilities are keen, to whom the world opens an extensive, rich, and illimitable field of inquiry. What a universe of observation and of thought does he not enjoy, utterly unknown to him whose sole attention is engrossed in a dull round of customary duties, almost mechanical in their influence, where the grasp of mental perception involves no original reach of thought! One of those individuals, whose tenor of mind, unless perturbed by the contingencies of trade, swim down the stream of life with tranquillity, has indeed his enjoyments, he feels pleasures and gratifications which he terms substantial in the customary routine of calculated profits; but he knows not what obstruction means; he never experienced the ardour and the pain of intense thinking,-is awakened to no enthusiastic perception of feeling.

The chain of thought was opened, and spontaneously wandered through a succession of speculative questions connected with the subject. The citizen, for example, thus flowed the course of my speculations,—at his desk calculating his gains, or pursuing a dull round of customary duties, seldom bestows his meditations upon a train of thought or of sentiment which he deems purely visionary.

The man of leisure who devotes the hours of his life to the mere amusements of a country life, who, amidst objects whose intrinsic beauty can ever animate and charm, knows no pleasures but the sound of the " "echoing horn," and the intense anxiety with which the sportsman, heedless of all besides, pursues the keen recreations which urge him in his career, laughs at the fine-drawn speculations, at the feigned and visionary gratifications

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which await the man of cultivated mental refinement-knows nothing, it is true, of the pleasures here imagined. The enjoyments produced by mental abstraction and association, are, to him like a tale told by an idiot," which, if it " signifies" any thing but folly, is of so recondite and equivocal a nature as to be unintelligible to minds unsophisticated by the dreams of absolute enthusiasm. These and a thousand others, all differing it may chance from each other in certain shades of temperament, pass through life, who never framed to themselves the possibility of the enjoyments here spoken of.

Multitudes who have enjoyed the benefit of education, who have sustained a character of high respectability in the several ways in which they have shone, would yet, it is more than probable, confess, were the question asked, that "the noiseless tenor of their way," was accompanied with gratifications as high as those which attended the hours of persons who have attained high eminence in literature, and who are famed for their intervals of abstraction. "The Miser himself," says Professor Ferguson, in his Essay on the History of Civil Society, can consider his wealth as the source of happiness, and has challenged his heir to have more pleasure in spending than he in amassing, his fortune."

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"Why," says the Doctor, whose speculations "On Happiness" indicate a deep insight into human nature, may not the man whose object is money, be understood to live a life of pleasure, not only more entire than that of the spendthrift, but even as much as the virtuoso, the scholar, or the man of taste."

What is there, indeed, it will be asked by the calculating individual, to invalidate the hypothesis that a person, whose senses are utterly deaf to the calls of literary speculations, may tread the journey of life, may descend into the vale of years, and experience in as high a degree the emotions of pleasure and of happiness as the first? The sportsman and the tradesman feel the keen delights of their several pursuits, as the Poet in his "frenzied" reveries, or as the Philosopher lost in a train of favourite abstraction.

The question, indeed, is one which

cannot, from its very nature, admit of absolute demonstration; any thing in the shape of mathematical proof is here entirely out of the question; these are matters in which it is agreed on all hands that much is to be felt and understood.

A mind that, by a course of reading and reflection, has become so far initiated as to know from its own exercises, the nature, character, and complexion, and can consequently appreciate these pleasures, will easily credit them to exist amongst certain others in a degree far beyond their own private experience. While he judges from analogies of the intenseness with which they may exist, he is sensible that it is altogether vain to endeavour to implant an idea of their reality in the breast of a person whose imagination is barren, whose energies are torpid and cold, and whose exclusions of thought seldom, unless in the calculations of private interest, take their flight beyond the ephemeral pursuits in which they are actually engaged.

Surrounded, for instance, with the circumstances, or with the objects which originated the train of thought in which I had engaged,-when all Nature concurred to exhilarate the soul with lively gratitude, and raise it to inspiration, when earth and air teems with fragrance and animation, and when gladness smiles upon the face of the country, variegated in the most beautiful forms, one of the class last pointed at would merely observe that it was a fine morning, whilst one of the former would probably feel the kindred energies of his soul expand under a sense of beauty, and his thoughts drawn forth in reverie. The latter would indeed discern a sort of beauty, so far as the colours, forms, and fragrance of the objects he views strikes upon his senses, but he remains wholly dead to any perception beyond: no ideas of harmony, cougruity, and happiness, which rush through the imagination and awaken the energies of the former, would ever strike him. His ideas run, habitually, in another channel; no conception of any affinity between the sublime and the beautiful in nature, and the sympathies or the meditations of genius, as it often characterizes the human mind, enters for a moment into the calculations of a breast, which, however warmed with the benevolent dis

positions of our common nature, has evidently no comprehension of a feeling which, stimulated from without, can people the mind with a thousand vivid creations.

The lark, if such similitudes are allowed us, which, sporting in the beams of the morning sun, rises from the neighbouring enamelled field, and the dull ox, unconscious of care, incapable of thought, grazes beneath, furnish, perhaps, no inappropriate emblems of the two classes of beings here spoken of. The feathered chorister warbles the note of gladness, as from increasing heights it surveys an ample domain of pastures, hills, vales, and woods; "joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings;" his little frame is doubtless thrilled with a full sensation of delight, as he carols amid the the widened prospect. He, perhaps, may personify, (as far as such a parallel shall be allowed to extend,) the thoughtless and the gay, whose pleasure is perfect freedom from care, and whose recklessness of things beyond the present moment becomes a characteristic feature. The latter may possibly furnish an emblem of those sons of care, who, although opportunities of mental expansion constantly present themselves above, beneath, and on every side, know not how to appreciate the beauty and variety which embellish, or the fitness, expediency, and final ends of all or any part of this "visible diurnal sphere," these are questions involving pleasures utterly beyond the range of their comprehension, yet both the one and the other pass their days in mere trifles, or the sordid calculations of interest. But parallels from brute life may not strike all readers as amongst the most felicitous.

We will, therefore, still supposing the author to be fixed in the persuasive attitude of recluse, in the embosomed retreat which had originated his subject, glance at some details connected in the History of Letters, with the testimony of private experience. Here the industry of a contemporary author has accumulated a mass of evidence, all bearing upon the point which was just now advocated,-that the man whose organization of mind habitually inclines him to high speculative inquiries, connected with things around him, enjoys, in the "ggregate, more vivid felicities than

one who is incapable of any such mental process.

But in mentioning D'Israeli, the author alluded to (and no one who is acquainted with his writings will mention him without respect), a few observations may be premised concerning his book "On the Literary Character." D'Israeli is, as every man should be in the peculiar line or walk of literature in which he chiefly attaches himself,-an enthusiast. He throws his eyes over the widened track of history, which teems with the memorials of the sons of genius. He views their private experience, analyzes their hours of meditation, and notes the confessions and acknowledgments by which they unite their suffrage in favour of the high and predominating enjoyments attendant upon literary avocations.

But it will strike every attentive reader of the interesting pages of this writer, that he often pursues his hypothesis to an excess. In the intensity of emotion, in the vivid nature of those bright images which crowd upon the mind, habitually disposed to reverie, all, who know any thing of the subject under consideration, will confess that he interests the heart, because he speaks the language of na

ture.

But the Author of "Curiosities of Literature," catching the ardour of his theme from some spirit whose genius of inspiration soared beyond that of his compeers, has often made his delineations assume a character of hyperbole and extravagance, calculated sometimes to defeat his end.

When an historian of Genius, in its variety of complexion and philosophical character, as it has developed itself in the literary, and guided the speculations of mankind, throws too high a colouring over his narrative, we cannot resist the impression that he writes for effect, and heightens the lineaments of simple nature, in order to swell the graphic interest of his pictures.

While we hail, therefore, with kindred recognition, the interesting details accumulated by his industry, itself directed by the stimulations of genius, the mind sometimes feels a sort of distrust in implicitly crediting the extent of those rhapsodies, under the operation of which he hassletimes depicted those who constitute

his heroes. Yet we, for the most part, repose with fond reciprocity of sentiment upon the native characteristics of Genius he has introduced to our notice, in the variety of examples with which he has crowded his canvass, and are beholden to him for the additional insight he has afforded us into the habits and the propensities which characterize the higher order of thinking humanity. He speaks, often, the language to which the sympathies which reign and "move within us," respond.

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Every life of a man of genius," observes D'Israeli, "composed by himself, presents us with an experimental philosophy of the mind." To examples of the meditations of Genius such as the following we indeed subscribe, because imagination whispers in each humbler votary of literary leisure, that a similar glow and expansion has occasionally peopled his own mind with airy visions. "In the stillness of meditation the mind of genius must be frequently thrown, it is a kind of darkness which hides from all surrounding objects, even in the light of day.

In Cicero on "Old Age," we find Cato admiring Caius Sulpitius Gallus, who, when he sat down to write in the morning, was surprised by the evening, and when he took up his pen in the evening was surprised, by the morning. Socrates has remained a whole day in immoveable meditation, his eyes and countenance directed to one spot, as if in the stillness of death. Archimedes, involved in the investigation of mathematical truth, Protogenes and Parmigiano 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 a city stormed by the enemy. Marino was so absorbed in the composition of his "Adonis," that he suffered his leg to be burnt for some time before the pain grew stronger than the intellectual pleasure of his imagination. Buffon has declared that he has often spent twelve or fourteen hours successively at his writing-desk, and still been in a state of pleasure."

These pleasurable impulses, these reveries of mutual enjoyment, have, doubtless, been felt by numerous spirits whose "capacious powers" have never met with a faithful chronicler

in the annals of fame. We can appreciate them, because the organization of our own internal visions of fancy suggest their reality. But the tumultuary feeling of agitated excitement, which D'Israeli afterwards delineates, describes a state of the system not so exactly within the reach of either our experience or our comprehension.

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"When Malebranche," rejoins our eloquent memorialist, "first took up Des Cartes' Treatise on Man, the germ of his own subsequent philosophical system, such was his intense feeling, that a violent palpitation of the heart more than once obliged him to lay down the volume. When the first idea of the Essay on the Arts and Sciences rushed on the mind of Rousseau, a feverish symptom in his nervous system approached to a slight delirium. When we are farther told of Tasso, in the paroxysms which will occasionally entrance the votary of genius, holding imaginary conversations with a spirit which glided towards him on the beams of the sun;" of" Malebranche, listening to the voice of God within him," (alluding to his hypothesis); of Lord Herbert, on his knees in the stillness of the sky," (having reference to the mysterious sounds from the clear empyrean, which enjoined him to publish his book "De Veritate"); of "Pascal, starting at times at an abyss opening by his side;" of Des Cartes, hearing a voice in the air exhorting him to the pursuit of truth;" of "Collins and Cowper, whose illusions were as strong as those of Swedenborg;" we are strongly tempted to view these excessive affections as the freaks of fancy; not so much, perhaps, as the legitimate excrescences of genius, as the feverish flights of a disordered imagination, and not altogether dissimilar to those of the mad enthusiast lastmentioned. "Were it possible," observes D'Israeli, "to collect some thoughts of great thinkers which were never written, we should discover vivid conceptions, and an originality they never dared to pursue in their works." How constantly has the truth of this been verified in the history and experience of men of letters! Not only in our hours of study, and in those sensibilities of soul which stimulate with unremitting devotedness to the pleasing toil of fresh discoveries, but in our intervals of luxuriant

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