This intense abstraction operates visibly; this perturbation of the faculties, as might be supposed, affects persons of genius physically.  What a forcible description the late Madame Roland, who certainly was a woman of the first genius, gives of herself on her first reading of Telemachus and Tasso.  “My respiration rose; I felt a rapid fire colouring my face, and my voice changing, had betrayed my agitation; I was Eucharis for Telemachus, and Erminia for Tancred; however, during this perfect transformation, I did not yet think that I myself was any thing, for any one.  The whole had no connexion with myself, I sought for nothing around me; I was them, I saw only the objects which existed for them; it was a dream, without being awakened.”—­Metastasio describes a similar situation.  “When I apply with a little attention, the nerves of my sensorium are put into a violent tumult.  I grow as red in the face as a drunkard, and am obliged to quit my work.”  When Malebranche first took up Descartes on Man, the germ and origin of his philosophy, he was obliged frequently to interrupt his reading by a violent palpitation of the heart.  When the first idea of the Essay on the Arts and Sciences rushed on the mind of Rousseau, it occasioned such a feverish agitation that it approached to a delirium.

This delicious inebriation of the imagination occasioned the ancients, who sometimes perceived the effects, to believe it was not short of divine inspiration.  Fielding says, “I do not doubt but that the most pathetic and affecting scenes have been writ with tears.”  He perhaps would have been pleased to have confirmed his observation by the following circumstances.  The tremors of Dryden, after having written an Ode, a circumstance tradition has accidentally handed down, were not unusual with him; in the preface to his Tales he tells us, that in translating Homer he found greater pleasure than in Virgil; but it was not a pleasure without pain; the continual agitation of the spirits must needs be a weakener to any constitution, especially in age, and many pauses are required for refreshment betwixt the heats.  In writing the ninth scene of the second act of the Olimpiade, Metastasio found himself in tears; an effect which afterwards, says Dr. Burney, proved very contagious.  It was on this occasion that that tender poet commemorated the circumstance in the following interesting sonnet:—­

                         SONNET FROM METASTASIO.
     “Scrivendo l’Autore in Vienna l’anno 1733 la sua Olimpiade si
     senti commosa fino alle lagrime nell’ esprimere la divisione di
     due teneri amici:  e meravigliandosi che un falso, e da lui
     inventato disastro, potesse cagionargli una si vera passione,
     si fece a riflettere quanto poco ragionevole e solido
     fondamento possano aver le altre che soglion frequentamente
     agitarci, nel corso di nostra vita.