the romance which RACINE at length got by heart; no geometrician but bitterly inveighs against the father of PASCAL for not suffering him to study Euclid, which he at length understood without studying. The father of PETRARCH cast to the flames the poetical library of his son, amidst the shrieks, the groans, and the tears of the youth. Yet this burnt-offering neither converted Petrarch into a sober lawyer, nor deprived him of the Roman laurel. The uncle of ALFIERI for more than twenty years suppressed the poetical character of this noble bard; he was a poet without knowing how to write a verse, and Nature, like a hard creditor, exacted, with redoubled interest, all the genius which the uncle had so long kept from her. These are the men whose inherent impulse no human opposition, and even no adverse education, can deter from proving them to be great men.
Let us, however, be just to the parents of a man of genius; they have another association of ideas respecting him than ourselves. We see a great man, they a disobedient child; we track him through his glory, they are wearied by the sullen resistance of one who is obscure and seems useless. The career of genius is rarely that of fortune or happiness; and the father, who himself may not be insensible to glory, dreads lest his son be found among that obscure multitude, that populace of mean artists, self-deluded yet self-dissatisfied, who must expire at the barriers of mediocrity.
If the youth of genius be struggling with a concealed impulse, he will often be thrown into a train of secret instruction which no master can impart. Hippocrates profoundly observed, that "our natures have not been taught us by any master." The faculty which the youth of genius displays in after-life may exist long ere it is perceived; and it will only make its own what is homogeneous with itself. We may often observe how the mind of this youth stubbornly rejects whatever is contrary to its habits, and alien to its affections. Of a solitary character, for solitariness is the wild nurse of his contemplations, he is fancifully described by one of the race—and here 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 fantastic ruminations, and there I should have composed many a poem, had I then known to write either in verse or prose in any language whatever."
[Footnote A: This solemnity of manner was aped in the days of Elizabeth and James I. by such as affected scholar-like habits, and is frequently alluded to by the satirists of the time. BEN JONSON, in his "Every Man in his Humour," delineates the "country gull," Master Stephen, as affecting "to be mightily given to melancholy," and receiving the assurance, "It's your only fine humour, sir; your true melancholy breeds your perfect fine wit, sir."—ED.]
An incident of this nature is revealed to us by the other noble and mighty spirit of our times, who could most truly exhibit the history of the youth of genius, and he has painted forth the enthusiasm of the boy TASSO:—
—From my very birth
My soul was drunk with love, which did pervade
And mingle with whate'er I saw on earth;
Of objects all inanimate I made
Idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers
And rocks whereby they grew, a paradise,
Where I did lay me down within the shade
Of waving trees, and dream'd uncounted hours,
Though I was chid for wandering.
The youth of genius will be apt to retire from the active sports of his mates. BEATTIE paints himself in his own Minstrel:
Concourse, and noise, and toil he ever fled,
Nor cared to mingle in the clamorous fray
Of squabbling imps; but to the forest sped.
BOSSUET would not join his young companions, and flew to his solitary task, while the classical boys avenged themselves by a schoolboy's villanous pun: stigmatising the studious application of Bossuet by the bos suetus aratro which frequent flogging had made them classical enough to quote.
The learned HUET has given an amusing detail of the inventive persecutions of his schoolmates, to divert him from his obstinate love of study. "At length, in order to indulge my own taste, I would rise with the sun, while they were buried in sleep, and hide myself in the woods, that I might read and study in quiet;" but they beat the bushes, and started in his burrow the future man of erudition. Sir WILLIAM JONES was rarely a partaker in the active sports of Harrow; it was said of GRAY that he was never a boy; the unhappy CHATTERTON and BURNS were singularly serious in youth;[A] as were HOBBES and BACON. MILTON has preserved for us, in solemn numbers, his school-life—
When I was yet a child, no childish play
To me was pleasing: all my mind was set
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do
What might be public good: myself I thought
Born to that end, born to promote all truth,
All righteous things.
[Footnote A: Dr. Gregory says of Chatterton, "Instead of the
