sm, and renders everything that surrounds us as
distant as if an immense interval separated us from the scene. Poggius has
told us of DANTE, that he indulged his meditations more strongly than any
man he knew; for when deeply busied in reading, he seemed to live only in
his ideas. Once the poet went to view a public procession; having entered
a bookseller's shop, and taken up a book, he sunk into a reverie; on his
return he declared that he had neither seen nor heard a single occurrence
in the public exhibition, which had passed unobserved before him. It has
been told of a modern astronomer, that one summer night, when he was
withdrawing to his chamber, the brightness of the heavens 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 it is late." He had gazed the
entire night in meditation, and was not aware of it. Abernethy has finely
painted the situation of NEWTON in this state of mind. I will not change
his words, for his words are his feelings. "It was this power of mind
--which can contemplate the greatest number of facts or propositions with
accuracy--that so eminently distinguished Newton from other men. It was
this power that enabled him to arrange the whole of a treatise in his
thoughts before he committed a single idea to paper. In the exercise of
this power, he was known occasionally to have passed a whole night or day,
entirely inattentive to surrounding objects."

There is nothing incredible in the stories related of some who have
experienced this entranced state in study, where the mind, deliciously
inebriated with the object it contemplates, feels nothing, from the excess
of feeling, as a philosopher well describes it. The impressions from our
exterior sensations are often suspended by great mental excitement.
ARCHIMEDES, involved in the investigation of mathematical truth, and the
painters PROTOGENES and PARMEGIANO, 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 the terrors and storming of the place by
the enemy. MARINO was so absorbed in the composition of his "Adonis," that
he suffered his leg to be burned before the painful sensation grew
stronger than the intellectual pleasure of his imagination.