Victor owed the _siesta_ of his heart to the sciences,[87] particularly _Poetry_ and _Philosophy_, which two move, as do _comets_ and _planets_, around the _same sun_ (that of Truth), and differ only in the _shape_ of their orbits, as comets and poets have the _greater ellipse_. His training and talents had accustomed him to the vital air and oxygen of the study, which is also the only dormitory of our passions, and that only cloister and haven of bliss for men who would escape the broad whirlpool of the senses and fashions. The sciences are, more than virtue, their own reward, and they make one a partaker of happiness,--she only makes him worthy of it; and the prize-medals, pensions, and positive rewards, and the _patent_ which many scholars would fain get for their studying, belong at most to the literary apprentice-brethren, who make it a penance and a torture, but not to the masters of the chair, who make it a pleasure and a delight. A scholar has no _ennui_; only a throne-incumbent has to prescribe for himself, against this nervous consumption, a hundred court-festivals, cavaliers of honor, whole countries, and human blood! Good heavens! a reader who, in Victor's Sabbatical weeks, should have taken a ladder and climbed up to his window,--would he have espied anything there but a jubilant thing, that went gliding about over the fields of learning as among islands of the blest?--a thing which, in its ecstasy, knew not whether it should think or compose or read, and particularly _what_ or _whom_, out of the whole _high_ nobility of books ranged before it. In this bridal chamber of the mind (such are our study-chambers), in this concert-hall of the finest voices gathered from all times and places, the æsthetic and philosophical enjoyments almost overpowered his faculty of choice. Reading hurried him into writing, writing to reading, thinking to sentiment, and the latter to the former. I could go on with more satisfaction in this description, if I had previously written how he studied; namely, that he never wrote without having read himself full[88] on the subject, and the reverse, that he never read without having first _thought_ himself _hungry_. One should, he said, without an intense occasion and impulse from without, i. e. from within, not only not make verses, but even a philosophical paragraph; nor should any one set himself down and say: "Now, at three o'clock on this Bartholomew's day, I will go at it, and cleverly prove the following proposition." I can now proceed.