APRIL 26, 1912] 
Thou art all the soul’s desire. ’’— 
Sang the Merman’s Heart of Fire. 
‘*Woe thee, Nekkan! Ne’er was given 
Thee to walk the ways of Heaven; 
Vain the vision, 
Fate’s derision, 
Thee that raps to realms elysian, 
Fathomless profounds are thine’’— 
Quired the answering voice divine. 
Vy 
Came an echo from the West, 
Pierced the deep celestial breast; 
Summoned, far the Seraph fled, 
Trailing splendors overhead; 
Broad beneath her flying feet, 
Laughed the silvered ocean-street. 
VI 
On the Merman’s mortal sight 
Instant fell the pall of Night; 
Sunk to the sea’s profoundest floor 
He dreams the vanished Vision o’er, 
Hears anew the starry chime, 
Ponders aye Eternal Time. 
““Thoughts that hope not, thoughts that fear not, 
Thoughts that Man and Demon veer not 
Times unending 
Comprehending, 
Space and worlds of worlds transcending, 
These are mine—but these alone! ’’— 
Sighs the Merman’s heart of stone. 
I have said that the poem, if it receive 
the interpretation that I have invited you 
to give it, throws much light on the human 
significance of mathematics and indicates 
well the place of the normal mathematician 
in the world of spiritual interests. No 
doubt the place of the merman and the 
place of the angel are not the same: no 
doubt the world of whatsoever in thought 
is passionless, infinite and everlasting, and 
the world of whatsoever in feeling is high 
and beauteous and good are distinct 
worlds, and they are sundered wide in the 
poem. But, though in the poem they are 
held widely apart, in the poet they are 
united. For the song is not the merman’s 
song nor are its words the words of the 
SCIENCE 
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seraph. It is the voice of the poet—a voice 
of man. The merman’s world and the 
world of the seraph are not the same, they 
are very distinct; in conception they are 
sundered; they may be sundered in life, 
but in life it need not be so. The merman 
indeed is confined to the one world and the 
seraph to the other, but man, a man unless 
he be a merman, may inhabit them both. 
For the angel’s denial, the derision of fate, 
is not spoken of man, it is spoken of the 
merman; and the merman’s sigh is not his 
own, it is a human sigh—so lonely seems 
the merman in the depths of his abode. 
No, the world of interests of the human 
spirit is not the merman’s world alone nor 
the seraph’s alone. It is not so simple. It 
is rather a cluster of worlds, of worlds that 
differ among themselves as differ the lights 
by which they are characterized. As differ 
the lights. The human spirit is susceptible 
of a variety of lights and it lives at once in 
a corresponding variety of worlds. There 
is perception’s light, commonly identified 
with solar radiance or with the radiance of 
sound, for music, too, is, to the spirit, a 
kind of illumination: perceptional light, in 
which we behold the colors, forms and har- 
monies of external nature: a beautiful 
revelation—a world in which any one 
might be willing to spend the remainder of 
his days if he were but permitted to live so 
long. And there is imagination’s light, 
disclosing a new world filled with wondrous 
things, things that may or may not re- 
semble the things revealed in perception’s 
light but are never identical with them: 
light that is not superficial nor constrained 
to paths that are straight but reveals the 
interiors of what it illuminates and phases 
that look away. Again, there is the light 
of thought, of reason, of logic, the light of 
analysis, far dimmer than perception’s 
light, dimmer, too, than that of imagina- 
tion, but far more penetrating and far more 
