nto absorbing
reveries when the senses of other men are overcome at the appearance of
destruction; he continues to view only Nature herself. The mind of PLINY,
to add one more chapter to his mighty scroll, sought Nature amidst the
volcano in which he perished. VERNET was on board a ship in a raging
tempest where all hope was given up. The astonished captain beheld the
artist of genius, his pencil in his hand, in calm enthusiasm sketching the
terrible world of waters--studying the wave that was rising to devour
him.[A]

[Footnote A: Vernet was the artist whose sea-ports of France still
decorate the Louvre. He was marine painter to Louis XV. and grandfather of
the celebrated Horace Vernet, whose recent death has deprived France of
her best painter of battle-scenes.--ED.]

There is a tender enthusiasm in the elevated studies of antiquity. Then
the ideal presence or the imaginative existence prevails, by its perpetual
associations, or as the late Dr. Brown has, perhaps, more distinctly
termed them, _suggestions._ "In contemplating antiquity, the mind itself
becomes antique," was finely observed by Livy, long ere our philosophy of
the mind existed as a system. 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