tinuation, or a revival. The semina of resurrection are concealed in extinct bodies, as in the blood of man; the ashes of roses will again revive into roses, though smaller and paler than if they had been planted; unsubstantial and unodoriferous, they are not roses which grow on rose-trees, but their delicate apparitions; and like apparitions, they are seen but for a moment! The process of the Palingenesis, this picture of immortality, is described. These philosophers having burnt a flower, by calcination disengaged the salts from its ashes, and deposited them in a glass phial; a chemical mixture acted on it, till in the fermentation they assumed a bluish and spectral hue. This dust, thus excited by heat, shoots upward into its primitive forms; by sympathy the parts unite, and while each is returning to its destined place, we see distinctly the stalk, the leaves, and the flower arise; it is the pale spectre of a flower coming slowly forth from its ashes. The heat passes away, the magical scene declines, till the whole matter again precipitates itself into the chaos at the bottom. This vegetable phoenix lies thus concealed in its cold ashes, till the presence of heat produces its resurrection — in its absence it returns to its death.

THE NECESSITY OF SOLITUDE TO GENIUS.

(From the "Literary Character.")

Ir is, however, only in solitude that the genius of eminent men has been formed. There their first thoughts sprang, and there it will become them to find their last: for the solitude of old age and old age must be often in solitude may be found the happiest with the literary character. Solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is the true parent of genius. In all ages solitude has been called for, has been flown to. No considerable work was ever composed, till its author, like an ancient magician, first retired to the grove, or to the closet, to invocate. When genius languishes in an irksome solitude among crowds - that is the moment to fly into seclusion and meditation. There is a society in the deepest solitude; in all the men of genius of the past

"First of your kind, Society divine!"

and in themselves; for there only can they indulge in the romances of their soul, and there only can they occupy themselves in their dreams and their vigils, and, with the morning

fly without interruption to the labor they had reluctantly quitted. If there be not periods when they shall allow their days to melt harmoniously into each other, if they do not pass whole weeks together in their study, without intervening absences, they will not be admitted into the last recess of the Muses. Whether their glory comes from researches, or from enthusiasm, Time, with not a feather ruffled on his wings, Time alone opens discoveries and kindles meditation. This desert of solitude, so vast and so dreary to the man of the world, to the man of genius is the magical garden of Armida, whose enchantments arose amidst solitude, while solitude was everywhere among those enchantments.

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Whenever Michelangelo, that " divine madman,” as Richardson once wrote on the back of one of his drawings, was meditating on some great design, he closed himself up from the world. Why do you lead so solitary a life?" asked a friend. "Art," replied the sublime artist, "Art is a jealous god; it requires the whole and entire man." During his mighty labor in the Sistine Chapel he refused to have any communication with any person even at his own house. Such undisturbed and solitary attention is demanded even by undoubted genius as the price of performance. How then shall we deem of that feebler race who exult in occasional excellence, and who so often deceive themselves by mistaking the evanescent flashes of genius for that holier flame which burns on its altar, because the fuel is incessantly applied?

We observe men of genius, in public situations, sighing for this solitude. Amidst the impediments of the world, they are doomed to view their intellectual banquet often rising before them like some fairy delusion, never to taste it.

The great Verulam often complained of the disturbances of his public life, and rejoiced in the occasional retirement he stole from public affairs. "And now, because I am in the country, I will send you some of my country fruits, which with me are good meditations; when I am in the city, they are choked with business."

Lord Clarendon, whose life so happily combined the contemplative with the active powers of man, dwells on three periods of retirement which he enjoyed; he always took pleasure in relating the great tranquillity of spirit experienced during his solitude at Jersey, where, for more than two years, employed on his history, he daily wrote "one sheet of large paper with his own hand." At the close of his life, his literary labors in

his other retirements are detailed with a proud satisfaction. Each of his solitudes occasioned a new acquisition; to one he owed the Spanish, to another the French, and to a third the Italian literature. The public are not yet acquainted with the fertility of Lord Clarendon's literary labors.

It was not vanity that induced Scipio to declare of solitude, that it had no loneliness for him, since he voluntarily retired amidst a glorious life to his Linternum. Cicero was uneasy amid applauding Rome, and has distinguished his numerous works by the title of his various villas. Aulus Gellius marked his solitude by his "Attic Nights." The "Golden Grove" of Jeremy Taylor is the produce of his retreat at the Earl of Carberry's seat in Wales; and the "Diversions of Purley" preserved a man of genius for posterity.

Voltaire had talents, well adapted for society; but at one period of his life he passed five years in the most secret seclusion, and indeed usually lived in retirement. Montesquieu quitted the brilliant circles of Paris for his books and his meditations, and was ridiculed by the gay triflers he deserted; "but my great work," he observes in triumph," avance à pas de géant." Harrington, to compose his "Oceana," severed himself from the society of his friends. Descartes, inflamed by genius, hires an obscure house in an unfrequented quarter of Paris, and there he passes two years unknown to his acquaintances. Adam Smith, after the publication of his first work, withdrew into a retirement that lasted ten years; even Hume rallies him for separating himself from the world; but by this means the great political inquirer satisfied the world by his great work. And thus it was with men of genius long ere Petrarch withdrew to his Valchiusa.

POETS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND ARTISTS MADE BY ACCIDENT.

(From "Curiosities of Literature.")

ACCIDENT has frequently occasioned the most eminent geniuses to display their powers. It was at Rome, says Gibbon, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.

Father Malebranche, having completed his studies in philosophy and theology without any other intention than devot

ing himself to some religious order, little expected the celebrity his works acquired for him. Loitering in an idle hour in the shop of a bookseller, and turning over a parcel of books, "L'Homme de Descartes" fell into his hands. Having dipt into some parts, he read with such delight that the palpitations of his heart compelled him to lay the volume down. It was this circumstance that produced those profound contemplations which made him the Plato of his age.

Cowley became a poet by accident. In his mother's apartment he found, when very young, Spenser's "Fairy Queen, and by a continual study of poetry he became so enchanted of the Muse that he grew irrecoverably a poet.

Dr. Johnson informs us that Sir Joshua Reynolds had the first fondness of his art excited by the perusal of Richardson's Treatise.

Vaucanson displayed an uncommon genius for mechanics. His taste was first determined by an accident: when young, he frequently attended his mother to the residence of her confessor; and while she wept with repentance, he wept with weariness! In this state of disagreeable vacation, says Helvetius, he was struck with the uniform motion of the pendulum of the clock in the hall. His curiosity was roused; he approached the clock-case, and studied its mechanism; what he could not discover he guessed at. He then projected a similar machine, and gradually his genius produced a clock. Encouraged by this first success, he proceeded in his various attempts; and the genius which thus could form a clock, in time formed a fluting automaton.

If Shakespeare's imprudence had not obliged him to quit his wool trade and his town; if he had not engaged with a company of actors, and at length, disgusted with being an indifferent performer, he had not turned author, the prudent wool-seller had never been the celebrated poet.

Accident determined the taste of Molière for the stage. His grandfather loved the theatre, and frequently carried him there. The young man lived in dissipation; the father, observing it, asked in anger if his son was to be made an actor. "Would to God," replied the grandfather, "he was as good an actor as Montrose." The words struck young Molière; he took a disgust to his tapestry trade; and it is to this circumstance France owes her greatest comic writer.

Corneille loved; he made verses for his mistress, became a

poet, composed "Mélite," and afterwards his other celebrated works. The discreet Corneille had remained a lawyer.

Thus it is that the devotion of a mother, the death of Cromwell, deer-stealing, the exclamation of an old man, and the beauty of a woman, have given five illustrious characters to Europe.

We owe the great discovery of Newton to a very trivial accident. When a student at Cambridge, he had retired during the time of the plague into the country. As he was reading under an apple-tree, one of the fruit fell, and struck him a smart blow on the head. When he observed the smallness of the apple, he was surprised at the force of the stroke. This led him to consider the accelerating motion of falling bodies; from whence he deduced the principle of gravity, and laid the foundation of his philosophy.

Ignatius Loyola was a Spanish gentleman, who was dangerously wounded at the siege of Pampeluna. Having heated his imagination by reading the "Lives of the Saints," which were brought to him in his illness instead of a romance, he conceived a strong ambition to be the founder of a religious order; whence originated the celebrated society of the Jesuits.

Rousseau found his eccentric powers first awakened by the advertisement of the singular annual subject which the Academy of Dijon proposed for that year, in which he wrote his celebrated Declamation against the arts and sciences; a circumstance which determined his future literary efforts.

La Fontaine, at the age of twenty-two, had not taken any profession or devoted himself to any pursuit. Having accidentally heard some verses of Malherbe, he felt a sudden impulse, which directed his future life. He immediately bought a Malherbe, and was so exquisitely delighted with this poet that, after passing the nights in treasuring his verses in his memory, he would run in the daytime to the woods, where, concealing himself, he would recite his verses to the surrounding dryads.

Flamsteed was an astronomer by accident. He was taken from school on account of his illness, when Sacrobosco's book "De Sphæra" having been lent to him, he was so pleased with it that he immediately began a course of astronomic studies.

Pennant's first propensity to natural history was the pleasure he received from an accidental perusal of Willoughby's work on birds; the same accident, of finding on the table of