hundred books nor a 10_l_. library would be worth mentioning; say five
thousand, and having read those, then go to Kew, and spend a year
studying the specimens of wood only stored there, such a little slice
after all of the whole. You will then believe what I have advanced, that
there are no books as yet; they have got to be written; and if we pursue
the idea a little further, and consider that these are all about the
crude clods of life--for I often feel what a very crude and clumsy clod I
am--only of the earth, a minute speck among one hundred millions of
stars, how shall we write what is _there_? It is only to be written by
the mind or soul, and that is why I strive so much to find what I have
called the alchemy of nature. Let us not be too entirely mechanical,
Baconian, and experimental only; let us let the soul hope and dream and
float on these oceans of accumulated facts, and feel still greater
aspiration than it has ever known since first a flint was chipped before
the glaciers. Man's mind is the most important fact with which we are yet
acquainted. Let us not turn then against it and deny its existence with
too many brazen instruments, but remember these are but a means, and that
the vast lens of the Californian refractor is but glass--it is the
infinite speck upon which the ray of light will fall that is the one
great fact of the universe. By the mind, without instruments, the Greeks
anticipated almost all our thoughts; by-and-by, having raised ourselves
up upon these huge mounds of facts, we shall begin to see still greater
things; to do so we must look not at the mound under foot, but at the
starry horizon.




THE JULY GRASS.