its hand a scalpel which at first seems ruthless and disenchanting
as the scythe of death, but which afterwards becomes a key to unlock
some of the deepest mysteries, and leads us down whole galleries of
wonder. There is botany, culling from every nook and corner of the
earth weeds which are flowers, and flowers of all hues, and every
plant, from the "cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop which springs out of
the wall," and finding a terrible and imaginative pleasure in
handling the fell family of poisons, and in deriving the means of
protracting life and healing sickness from the very blossoms of death.
And there is chemistry, most poetical save astronomy of all the
sciences, seeking to spiritualise the material--to hunt the atom to
the point where it trembles over the gulf of nonentity--to weigh
gases in scales, and the elements in a balance, and, in its more
transcendental and daring shape, trying to interchange one kind of
metal with another, and all kinds of forms with all, as in a
music-led and mystic dance. Hence we find that such men as Beddoes,
the author of the "Bride's Tragedy," have turned away from poetry to
physiology, and found in it a grander if also ghastlier stimulus to
their imaginative faculty. Hence Crabbe delighted to load himself
with grasses and duckweed, and Goethe to fill his carriage with
every variety of plant and mountain flower. Hence Davy, and the late
lamented Samuel Brown, analysed, in the spirit of poets as well as
of philosophers, and gave to the crucible what it had long lost,
something of the air of a weird cauldron, bubbling over with magical
foam, and shining, not so much in the severe light of science as in
the

"Light that never was on sea or shore.
The consecration and the poet's dream."