shop of a bookseller to be a spectator of the passing show. He found a
book which greatly interested him; he devoured it in silence, and
plunged into an abyss of thought. On his return he declared that he had
neither seen, nor heard, the slightest occurrence of the public
exhibition which had passed before him. This enthusiasm renders
everything surrounding us as distant as if an immense interval separated
us from the scene. A modern astronomer, one summer night, withdrew to
his chamber; the brightness of the heaven showed a phenomenon. He passed
the whole night in observing it, and when they came to him early in the
morning, and found him in the same attitude, he said, like one who had
been recollecting his thoughts for a few moments, "It must be thus; but
I'll go to bed before 'tis late!" He had gazed the entire night in
meditation, and did not know it.

This intense abstraction operates visibly; this perturbation of the
faculties, as might be supposed, affects persons of genius physically.
What a forcible description the late Madame Roland, who certainly was a
woman of the first genius, gives of herself on her first reading of
Telemachus and Tasso. "My respiration rose; I felt a rapid fire
colouring my face, and my voice changing, had betrayed my agitation; I
was Eucharis for Telemachus, and Erminia for Tancred; however, during
this perfect transformation, I did not yet think that I myself was any
thing, for any one. The whole had no connexion with myself, I sought for
nothing around me; I was them, I saw only the objects which existed for
them; it was a dream, without being awakened."--Metastasio describes a
similar situation. "When I apply with a little attention, the nerves of
my sensorium are put into a violent tumult. I grow as red in the face as
a drunkard, and am obliged to quit my work." When Malebranche first took
up Descartes on Man, the germ and origin of his philosophy, he was
obliged frequently to interrupt his reading by a violent palpitation of