LEONARDO DA VINCI, who tells us how often he found the use of recollecting the ideas of what he had considered in the day after he had retired to bed, encompassed by the silence and obscurity of the night.  Sleepless nights are the portion of genius when engaged in its work; the train of reasoning is still pursued; the images of fancy catch a fresh illumination; and even a happy expression shall linger in the ear of him who turns about for the soft composure to which his troubled spirit cannot settle.

[Footnote A:  One of the most extraordinary instances of inspiration in dreams is told of Tartini, the Italian musician, whose “Devil’s Sonata” is well known to musicians.  He dreamed that the father of evil played this piece to him, and upon waking he put it on paper.  It is a strange wild performance, possessing great originality and vigour.—­ED.]

But while with genius so much seems fortuitous, in its great operations the march of the mind appears regular, and requires preparation.  The intellectual faculties are not always co-existent, or do not always act simultaneously.  Whenever any particular faculty is highly active, while the others are languid, the work, as a work of genius, may be very deficient.  Hence the faculties, in whatever degree they exist, are unquestionably enlarged by meditation.  It seems trivial to observe that meditation should precede composition, but we are not always aware of its importance; the truth is, that it is a difficulty unless it be a habit.  We write, and we find we have written ill; we re-write, and feel we have written well:  in the second act of composition we have acquired the necessary meditation.  Still we rarely carry on our meditation so far as its practice would enable us.  Many works of mediocrity might have approached to excellence, had this art of the mind been exercised.  Many volatile writers might have reached even to deep thinking, had they bestowed a day of meditation before a day of composition, and thus engendered their thoughts.  Many productions of genius have originally been enveloped in feebleness and obscurity, which have only been brought to perfection by repeated acts of the mind.  There is a maxim of Confucius, which in the translation seems quaint, but which is pregnant with sense—­

  Labour, but slight not meditation;
  Meditate, but slight not labour.

Few works of magnitude presented themselves at once, in their extent and with their associations, to their authors.  Two or three striking circumstances, unobserved before, are perhaps all which the man of genius perceives.  It is in revolving the subject that the whole mind becomes gradually agitated; as a summer landscape, at the break of day, is wrapped in mist:  at first, the sun strikes on a single object, but the light and warmth increasing, the whole scene glows in the noonday of imagination.  How beautifully this state of the mind, in the progress of composition, is described by DRYDEN, alluding to