SCIENCE AND POETRY. 373 



\vith which we see the red rays rising aslant over the 

 Righi, and finally bursting into a glorious effulgence as peak 

 after peak is tinged with the morning glow? Or when 

 we walk abroad in the full glow of the mid-day, does the 

 idea of the immensity of Heaven's great orb, the knowledge 

 of its distance from us, or the information which details 

 the extent of time occupied in the transit of its light-rays 

 earthwards, interfere in any sense with our delight in 

 the poetry which has selected astronomy as its theme. 

 Does such knowledge repress what Dr. Shairp would call 

 " the momentary elevation of heart," for which its subject 

 "has no words"? The eye rests on the grateful green 

 of nature which everywhere meets our gaze, and drinks 

 in the sense of beauty and of this earth's sweet fairness. 

 Shall I the less be filled with joy because I know that 

 the green is the botanist's " chlorophyll," and that but for the 

 verdant hues of plants, our world would become a great 

 stagnant pond of foul air? We stroll through a garden, 

 and the sensuous colour and perfume of the flowers 

 appeal to our sense of the beautiful, and make us glad. 

 Shall this sense be thwarted and annulled because we 

 know that colour and scent are but snares for insects, 

 and that the flower-plot is as a garden of temptation 

 to each little winged messenger bent on nature's errand 

 of flower-fertilization ? Because I know something of the 

 theory of dew, shall my sense of pleasure or of poetry, 

 aroused by the contemplation of the "infant diamonds" 

 which bespangle every blade of grass, and add an inex- 

 pressible charm and freshness to the morning air, be annihi- 

 lated and suppressed? The hues of the shell which is 

 tossed up at our feet by the restless waves enchant us, again, 

 through the colour-sense, and beauty of form and shape 

 appeals eloquently to us as part of the poetry of nature. 

 Shall you say that the colour is less bright when you find 

 that it is due to the refraction of the light, or that the form 

 of the shell is more mundane because you can tell how 

 it was made ? That tiny blossom which waves in all its 



