affectionate, simple and true; with a touch of poetry in her nature
which I had never suspected. She will make an excellent companion to the
fortunate man who wins her. When I remember the hard life she has led so
far, I confess I cannot help sympathising with her; but surely I am not
in love?"

I regret to say that my friend the astronomer, with all his good
qualities, was not quite free from the arrogance which leads some men of
science to assume a proprietary right in the objects of their discovery.
To hear him speak you would think he had created the stars, instead of
explaining a secret of their constitution. However, I was used to that
little failing in his manner. It was not that. No, it was chiefly the
matter of his discourse which had been distasteful to me. The sight of
that glorious firmament had filled me with a sentiment of awe and
reverence to which his dry and brutal facts were a kind of desecration.
Why should our sentiment so often shrink from knowledge? Are we afraid
its purity may be contaminated and defiled? Why should science be so
inimical to poetry? Is it because the reality is never equal to our
dreams? There is more in this antipathy than the fear of disillusion
and alloyment. Some of it arises from a difference in the attitude of
the mind.

To the poet, nature is a living mystery. He does not seek to know what
it is, or how it works. He allows it as a whole to impress itself on his
entire soul, like the reflection in a mirror, and is content with the
illusion, the effect. By its power and beauty it awakens ideas and
sentiments within him. He does not even consider the part which his own
mind plays, and as his fancy is quite free, he tends to personify
inanimate things, as the ancients did the sun and moon.