If thou would'st know the mystic song 



Chaunted when the sphere was young, 



Aloft, abroad, the pean swells, 



O wise man hear'st thou half it tells? 



To the open ear it sings 



The early genesis of things ; 



Of tendency through endless ages, 



Of star-dust and star pilgrimages, 



Of rounded worlds, of space and time, 



Of the old floods' subsiding slime, 



Of chemic matter, force and form, 



Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm. 



The rushing metamorphosis 



Dissolving all that fixture is, 



Melts things that be to things that seem, 



And solid nature to a dream. EMERSON 



Was war' ein Gk>tt der nur von aussen stiesse, 

 Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse 

 Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Innera zu bewegen, 

 Natur in Sich, Sich hi Natur zu hegen. GOETHE 



VIII 



SCIENTIFIC USE OF THE IMAGINATION 1 



"Lastly, physical investigation, more than anything besides, helps to teadi 

 us the actual value and right use of the Imagination of that wondrous faculty, 

 which, left to ramble uncontrolled, leads us astray into a wilderness of perplexi- 

 ties and errors, a land of mists and shadows ; but which, properly controlled by 

 experience and reflection, becomes the noblest attribute of man ; the source oi 

 poetic genius, the instrument of discovery in Science, without the aid of which 

 Newton would never have invented fluxions, nor Davy have decomposed the 

 earths and alkalies, nor would Columbus have found another Continent." 

 Address to the Royal Society by its President Sir Benjamin Brodie, Nov. 30, 1869 



1CAEE1ED with me to the Alps this year the burden 

 of this evening's work. Save from memory I had no 

 direct aid upon the mountains; but to spur up the emo- 

 tions, on which so much depends, as well as to nourish 



1 Discourse delivered before the British Association at Liverpool, September 

 16, 1870. 



409) 



