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.  Monsieur THOMAS, a modern French writer, and an intense thinker, would sit for hours against a hedge, composing with a low voice, taking the same pinch of snuff for half an hour together without being aware that it had long disappeared.  When he quitted his apartment, after prolonging his studies there, a visible alteration was observed in his person, and the agitation of his recent thoughts was still traced in his air and manner.  With eloquent truth BUFFON described those reveries of the student, which compress his day, and mark the hours by the sensations of minutes!  “Invention depends on patience:  contemplate your subject long; it will gradually unfold till a sort of electric spark convulses for a moment the brain, and spreads down to the very heart a glow of irritation.  Then come the luxuries of genius, the true hours for production and composition —­hours so delightful, that I have spent twelve or fourteen successively at my writing-desk, and still been in a state of pleasure.”  Bishop HORNE, whose literary feelings were of the most delicate and lively kind, has beautifully recorded them in his progress through a favourite and lengthened