SCIENCE AND LITEKATUEE 51 



moon give us the power to view and contemplate, 

 they call them all Gods." 



The ancients had that kind of knowledge which 

 the heart gathers; we have in superabundance that 

 kind of knowledge which the head gathers. If much 

 of theirs was made up of mere childish delusions, 

 how much of ours is made up of hard, barren, and 

 unprofitable details, — a mere desert of sand where no 

 green thing grows or can grow ! How much there 

 is in books that one does not want to know, that it 

 would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit 

 to know; how much of modern physical science is 

 a mere rattling of dead bones, a mere threshing of 

 empty straw ! Probably we shall come round to as 

 lively a conception of things by and by. Darwin 

 has brought us a long way toward it. At any rate, 

 the ignorance of the old writers is often more capti- 

 vating than our exact but more barren knowledge. 



The old books are full of this dew-scented know- 

 ledge, — knowledge gathered at first hand in the 

 morning of the world. In our more exact scientific 

 knowledge this pristine quality is generally miss- 

 ing; and hence it is that the results of science are 

 far less available for literature than the results of 

 experience. 



Science is probably unfavorable to the growth of 

 literature because it does not throw man back upon 

 himself and concentrate him as the old belief did; it 

 takes him away from himself, away from human re- 

 lations and emotions, and leads him on and on. We 

 wonder and marvel more, but we fear, dread, love, 



