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.”