home—­and died.  DROUAIS, a pupil of David, the French painter, was a youth of fortune, but the solitary pleasure of his youth was his devotion to Raphael; he was at his studies from four in the morning till night.  “Painting or nothing!” was the cry of this enthusiast of elegance; “First fame, then amusement,” was another.  His sensibility was great as his enthusiasm; and he cut in pieces the picture for which David declared he would inevitably obtain the prize.  “I have had my reward in your approbation; but next year I shall feel more certain of deserving it,” was the reply of this young enthusiast.  Afterwards he astonished Paris with his “Marius;” but while engaged on a subject which he could never quit, the principle of life itself was drying up in his veins.  HENRY HEADLEY and KIRKE WHITE were the early victims of the enthusiasm of study, and are mourned by the few who are organized like themselves.

  ’Twas thine own genius gave the final blow,
  And help’d to plant the wound that laid thee low;
  So the struck eagle, stretch’d upon the plain,
  No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
  View’d his own feather on the fatal dart,
  And wing’d the shaft that quiver’d in his heart;
  Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel
  He nursed the pinion which impell’d the steel,
  While the same plumage that had warm’d his nest,
  Drank the last life-drop of his bleeding breast,

One of our former great students, when reduced in health by excessive study, was entreated to abandon it, and in the scholastic language of the day, not to perdere substantiam propter accidentia.  With a smile the martyr of study repeated a verse from Juvenal: 

  Nec propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. 
  No! not for life lose that for which I live!

Thus the shadow of death falls among those who are existing with more than life about them.  Yet “there is no celebrity for the artist,” said GESNER, “if the love of his own art do not become a vehement passion; if the hours he employs to cultivate it be not for him the most delicious ones of his life; if study become not his true existence and his first happiness; if the society of his brothers in art be not that which most pleases him; if even in the night-time the ideas of his art do not occupy his vigils or his dreams; if in the morning he fly not to his work, impatient to recommence what he left unfinished.  These are the marks of him who labours for true glory and posterity; but if he seek only to please the taste of his age, his works will not kindle the desires nor touch the hearts of those who love the arts and the artists.”

Unaccompanied by enthusiasm, genius will produce nothing but uninteresting works of art; not a work of art resembling the dove of Archytas, which beautiful piece of mechanism, while other artists beheld flying, no one could frame such another dove to meet it in the air.  Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius, throwing the reader of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into the very ideal presence whence these works have really originated.  A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.