JAMES DWIGHT DANA 267 



privileges. I used to have a spring in my walk, and get delight 

 out of it. But for a little over a month, owing to a weakening of 

 some strings, my heart has compelled me to take what I should 

 before have called a creeping gait. Such encroachments are 

 reminders that the end is coming. But it will be peace, rest, and, 

 I believe, joy unending. Life were worth living if it were only for 

 the end." One is reminded of Browning's noble lines 



"Grow old along with me! 



The best is yet to be, 

 The last of life, for which the first was made." 



As a thinker, Dana was eminently characterized by breadth of 

 view. Though facts might be, as Agassiz so nobly said, "the 

 words of God," they were meaningless unless they could be ar- 

 ranged in sentences. Dana was eminently a generalizer and a 

 systematizer. The Manual of Geology is for every American 

 geologist the most indispensable book of reference for its encyclo- 

 pedic array of facts. But the general conception of the meaning 

 of geological fact with which the whole book is luminous is the 

 greater glory. If Dana sometimes mistook analogy for identity, 

 and sometimes grouped facts in a pseudo-system, he only showed 

 "the defects of his qualities." The only man who has i ma 

 unsound^ generalization fo fly* 

 at all. 



'There is a certain intellectual kinship between the philosopher 

 and the poet. The loftiest generalizations of science involve a 

 flight of imagination approaching the poetic. The minds most 

 gifted with the power to see the scientific meaning of natural phe- 

 nomena are often most keenly sensitive to the inspiration of na- 

 ture's beauty. Some of the descriptive passages in the Corals and 

 Coral Islands, and gem-like sentences which flash here and there 

 from the pages of the Manual of Geology, show a poet's sense 

 of nature's manifold and resistless charm. 



placed the flute and the 



In^Mslearly manhood he made some attempts at musical composi- 

 tion. Among these efforts was the music for an ode to the ship 



