206 BULLETIN OP THE 



himself among the "perivvig-pated fellows who tear a passion to 

 tatters" on the stage ; or, at the best, of taking rank with the 

 great dramatic artists who, standing' in front of the garish foot- 

 lights, " hold the mirror up to nature," iu a sense far different 

 from that of the experimental philosopher, standing in the clear 

 beams of that lumen siccum which Bacon has praised as the 

 light that is best of all for the eyes of the mind. But in the 

 midst of these "nnintelligible dumb shows," under which the 

 unique and original genius of Henry had thus far seemed to be 

 masquerading, we have now come to the time when his mind 

 underwent a great transfiguration, which revealed its native 

 brightness, and a transfiguration as sudden as it was great. 

 Minds richly endowed, if started at first on a wrong track, may 

 sometimes have, it would seem, an intellectual conversion as 

 marked as that moral conversion which is often visible in the 

 lives of great saints. It certainly was so in the case of Henry. 

 Overtaken in the sixteenth year of his age by a slight accident, 

 which detained him for a season within doors, he chanced, in 

 search of mental diversion, to cast his eyes upon a book which 

 a Scotch gentleman, boarding with his mother, had left upon the 

 table in his chamber. It was Dr. Gregory's Lectures on Ex- 

 perimental Philosophy, Astronomy, and Chemistry. It com- 

 mences with an address to the young reader, in which the author 

 stimulates him to deeper inquiry concerning the familiar objects 

 around him. "You throw a stone," he says, " or shoot an arrow- 

 upwards into the air; why does it not go forward in the air, and 

 in the direction you give it? What force is it that presses it 

 down to the earth ? Why does flame or smoke always mount 

 upward ? You look into a clear well of water, and see your own 

 face and figure, as if painted there ; why is this ? You are told 

 it is done by reflection of light. But what is reflection of light?" 

 etc. etc. These queries certainly are very far from representing 

 the prudens quaedio of Bacon in even its most elementary form, 

 but they opened to the mind of young Henry an entirely "new 

 world of thought and enjoyment." His attention was enchained 

 by this book as it had not been enchained by the fiction of Brooke, 

 or by the phantasmagoria of the drama.* The book did for him 



* He soon became so much interested in this book that its owner gave 

 it to him, and iu token of tlie epoch it liad marked in his life, Prof. Henry 

 ever afterwards preserved it among tho choicest memorials of his hoj- 



