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CHAPTER VI. 



SCIENCE IN THE ASCENDANT. 



DURING these last quiet years of his residence in Cro- 

 marty, when Miller was putting the last touches to 

 the curiosa felicitas of his style, and choosing irreversibly 

 the form in which his higher intellectual activity was to 

 be exerted, the question came often directly or indirectly 

 before him whether his supreme devotion should be to 

 literature or to science. Poetry had been as good as 

 abandoned. He did, indeed, as his wife and one or two 

 of his most confidential friends were aware, cherish the 

 resolution to return to verse, and had visions of bringing 

 even his science ultimately to minister to the Muse. 

 But for the present his critical faculty in the poetical 

 department had outstripped his productive faculty, and 

 he wrote almost exclusively in prose. We find, how- 

 ever, from his correspondence, that the legendary tales 

 and biographical sketches to which he had so long de- 

 voted attention, had ceased to interest him as formerly, 

 and that he contemplated a transference of his allegiance 

 from literature to science. Literature has been called 

 the science of man ; science may be called the literature 

 of nature. If the hackneyed quotation from Pope as to 

 man being mankind's noblest study has become hack- 



