It is not
that Madam Science shows any antagonism to Lady Poetry; but the
atmosphere and plane on which alone they can meet as friends who
understand each other, is the mind and heart of the sage, not of the
boy. The youth gazes on the face of Science, cold, clear, beautiful;
then, turning, looks for his friend--but, alas! Poetry has fled. With a
great pang at the heart he rushes abroad to find her, but descries only
the rainbow glimmer of her skirt on the far horizon. At night, in his
dreams, she returns, but never for a season may he look on her face of
loveliness. What, alas! have evaporation, caloric, atmosphere,
refraction, the prism, and the second planet of our system, to do with
"sad Hesper o'er the buried sun?" From quantitative analysis how shall
he turn again to "the rime of the ancient mariner," and "the moving
moon" that "went up the sky, and nowhere did abide"? From his window he
gazes across the sands to the mightily troubled ocean: "What is the
storm to me any more!" he cries; "it is but the clashing of countless
water-drops!" He finds relief in the discovery that, the moment you
place man in the midst of it, the clashing of water-drops becomes a
storm, terrible to heart and brain: human thought and feeling, hope,
fear, love, sacrifice, make the motions of nature alive with mystery and
the shadows of destiny.
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