6 ANIMAL SKETCHES. 



perhaps more frequently the case than the former. But 

 surely in the richly-varied nature of man there is room for 

 both poetry and science. A feeling for poetry may save 

 the man of science from narrowness and a too mechanical 

 interpretation of nature. A knowledge of scientific 

 method may save the poet from vagueness and from 

 wandering too far from the stern facts of existence. 



And in the interpretation of nature, no matter at what 

 point of observation, be it never so minute, you start, you 

 will be led on in ever-widening circles throughout the 

 whole broad universe. I have sometimes during one of 

 the pleasant breathing spaces in the ascent of a Swiss 

 snow-peak yielded up my mind to the reverie which a single 

 snow-flake would suggest, and the flake has told me its 

 story ; has spoken of its former free existence in the ocean 

 as a minute droplet, of its yet freer aerial life as the winds 

 bore it mountain-wards, of its crystallization amid the fury 

 of an Alpine storm, of its coming to rest where I found it ; 

 and then of its future, the constrained motion in the 

 glacier, the freedom of the mountain torrent, the stately 

 flow of the great river in which it will participate, the 

 final arrival once more in its ocean home. Ail this would 

 the snow-flake suggest -with a fulness which I need not 

 here describe, and side avenues of thought would open 

 out on all sides. Many scenes, for example, does the river } 

 of which the transformed snow-flake will form a constitu- 

 ent atom, reflect in the mirror of its broad surface. The 

 cottage and the hamlet are not less faithfully reflected than 

 the castle and the populous city ; the sheep in the upland 

 meadow are as clearly imaged as the deer in the broad- 

 stretching park ; sloping fields of corn and flax are mirrored 

 as truly as ancient trees of stately growth. But in the 

 upper reaches the reflections are only disturbed by the 

 plash of the ferryman's oars, while nearer the ocean the 



