fancies are facts:

He is retired as noon-tide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove.

The romantic SIDNEY exclaimed, "Eagles fly alone, and they are but sheep
which always herd together."

As yet this being, in the first rudiments of his sensations, is touched by
rapid emotions, and disturbed by a vague restlessness; for him the images
of nature are yet dim, and he feels before he thinks; for imagination
precedes reflection. One truly inspired unfolds the secret story--

Endow'd with all that Nature can bestow,
The child of fancy oft in silence bends
O'er the mixt treasures of his pregnant breast
With conscious pride. From thence he oft resolves
To frame he knows not what excelling things;
And win he knows not what sublime reward
Of praise and wonder!

But the solitude of the youth of genius has a local influence; it is full
of his own creations, of his unmarked passions, and his uncertain
thoughts. The titles which he gives his favourite haunts often intimate
the bent of his mind--its employment, or its purpose; as PETRARCH called
his retreat _Linternum_, after that of his hero Scipio; and a young poet,
from some favourite description in Cowley, called a spot he loved to muse
in, "Cowley's Walk."

A temperament of this kind has been often mistaken for melancholy.[A]
"When the intermission of my studies allowed me leisure for recreation,"
says BOYLE of his early life, "I would very often steal away from all
company, and spend four or five hours alone in the fields, and think at
random; making my delighted imagination the busy scene where some romance
or other was daily acted." This circumstance alarmed his friends, who
concluded that he was overcome with a growing melancholy. ALFIERI found
himself in this precise situation, and experienced these undefinable
emotions, when, in his first travels at Marseilles, his lonely spirit only
haunted the theatre and the seashore: the tragic drama was then casting
its influences over his unconscious genius. Almost every evening, after
bathing in the sea, it delighted him to retreat to a little recess where
the land jutted out; there would he sit, leaning his hack against a high
rock, which he tells us, "concealed from my sight every part of the land
behind me, while before and around me I beheld nothing but the sea and the
heavens: the sun, sinking into the waves, was lighting up and embellishing
these two immensities; there would I pass a delicious hour of