lked in the fragrant air. Such compositions as his
"Dream of a Madman" he would set about by first seating himself at the
harpsichord, and "fantasying" for a while on it, till the ideas, or
"imaginings," came--which presently they would do with a rush.

Tradition, as we get it through the historian of the Clapham Sect,
informs us that Wilberforce wrote his "Practical View" under the roof of
two of his best friends, in so fragmentary and irregular a manner, that
one of them, when at length the volume lay complete on the table,
professed, on the strength of this experience, to have become a convert
to the opinion that a fortuitous concourse of atoms might, by some
felicitous chance, combine themselves into the most perfect of forms--a
moss-rose or a bird of paradise.

Coleridge told Hazlitt that he liked to compose in walking over uneven
ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood.

Sheridan composed at night, with a profusion of lights around him, and a
bottle of wine by his side. He used to say: "If a thought is slow to
come, a glass of good wine encourages it; and when it does come, a glass
of good wine rewards it."

Lamartine, in the days of his prosperity, composed in a studio with
tropical plants, birds, and every luxury around him to cheer the senses.

Berkeley composed his "Minute Philosopher" under the shade of a rock on
Newport Beach.

Burns wove a stanza as he ploughed the field.

Charlotte Bronte had to choose her favorable days for writing,--sometimes
weeks, or even months, elapsing before she felt that she had anything
to add to that portion of her story which was already written; then some
morning she would wake up, and the progress of her tale lay clear and
bright before her, says Mrs. Gaskell, in distinct vision; and she set
to work to write out what was more present to her mind at such times
than her actual life was. She wrote on little scraps of paper, in a
minute hand, holding each against a piece of board, such as is used
in binding books, for a desk,--a plan found to be necessary for one so
short-sighted,--and this sometimes as she sat near the fire by twilight.

While writing "Jane Eyre" she became intensely concerned in the fortunes
of her heroine, whose smallness and plainness corresponded with her own.
When she had brought the little Jane to Thornfield, her enthusiasm had
grown so great that she could not stop. She went on incessantly for
weeks. At the end of this