“Flying from Nature to study her laws,
And dulling delight by exploring the cause?”
I do fear that this analytic study of nature destroys the romance of
life which flings around us its rainbow beauty.
Oh, for those halcyon days of infancy, when every thought was a promise;
when hope, the _dream_ of waking men, was lost in its fulfilment; and
even fear itself was a thrill of romance!
Behold yon silver moon! it is, to the _poet’s eye_, an orb of unsullied
beauty, and the planets and their satellites glitter like diamond studs
in the firmament. Yet shift but the lens of the star-gazer, and lo! dark
and murky spots instantly shadow o’er its purity; nay, have I not read
that one deep astronomer, Fraüenhofer, has discovered mountains and
cities; and another, Sir John Herschell, the laying down of rail-roads
in the moon? So the optics of Gulliver magnified the court beauties of
Brobdignag into monsters, and the auburn tresses of a maid of honour
into a coil of dusty ropes!
EV. A truce, fair Castaly. If science discovers defects, does it not
unfold new beauties, a new world of animated atoms, endowed with
faculties and passions as influential as our own? Nay, science has
thrown even a _poetry_ around the blue mould of a cheese-crust; and in
the bloom of the peach the microscope has shown forth a treasury of
flowers, and gigantic forests, in the depths of which the roving
animalcule finds as secure an ambush as the lion and the tiger within
the gloomy jungles of Hindostan. In a drop of liquid crystal the
water-wolf chases his wounded victim, till it is changed to crimson with
its blood. Ehrenberg has seen monads in fluid the 24,000th part of an
inch in size; and in one drop of water 500,000,000 creatures—the
population of the globe! I hope, Castaly, you will not, like the
Brahmin, break your microscope, because it unfolds to you these wonders
of the water.