374 LEISURE-TIME STUDIES. 



luxuriance has ere now inspired a poet's song. Because 

 you know how many sepals, petals, and stamens it possesses, 

 will its beauty fade away into commonplace colour, and 

 the sympathies it called forth in the poet and in yourself 

 be dispersed because you know its natural order and genus ? 

 Or turn shortly to consider other forms and methods where- 

 in the beautiful in nature appeals to us, and causes our 

 hearts to burst forth into song. You hear the entrancing 

 strains of music, and listen to the poetry of sound ; your 

 beauty-sense is inspired through the ear, and imagination 

 peoples the very air around you with the creations of the 

 "divine art." Will you tell me that your poetry-sense of the 

 beautiful in music is destroyed at the moment you acquire 

 a knowledge of musical principles, or when you understand 

 the mysteries of construction of the "cornet, flute, harp, 

 sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of music" of 

 modern times? The notes of glorious song ring through 

 the vaulted cathedral church, and lift our souls heavenwards ; 

 or the impassioned strains of a Norma touch within us 

 the chords of truest sympathy. Do you maintain seriously 

 that, because you happen to know the physiology of the 

 larynx and the mechanism of the vocal chords, the sweetest 

 notes touch you with no effect, and that the beauty and 

 poetry of song have fled from you for ever? To all such 

 queries there is but one reply. There is nothing, abso- 

 lutely nothing, in the nature of scientific study which, to 

 a mind naturally poetic, can chill or destroy the sense of 

 beauty and the faculty of poesy in which it originally 

 rejoiced. Mr. Ruskin, to my mind, does not deal with 

 the question in the wide, and I will add fair, sense in 

 which it demands to be treated, when he says, " This is the 

 difference between the mere botanist's knowledge of plants 

 and the great poet's or painter's knowledge of them. The 

 one notes their distinctions for the sake of swelling his 

 herbarium, the other that he may render them vehicles of 

 expression and emotion. The one counts the stamens, 

 affixes a name, and is content; the other observes every 



