Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/375

Rh us, for they address themselves to a limited faculty, not to the whole man; for that reason poetry is eternal. All the theorems of astronomy will never prevent the view of the infinite sky exciting the vague restlessness in us and the unsatisfied desire to know which constitute the poetry of the heavens. Are there any discoveries that do not touch upon other mysteries, and thus favor the always still wider play of the imagination? Science, which begins by astonishment, ends also, Coleridge says, with astonishment, of which poetry as well as philosophy is born; there is, therefore, an eternal suggestion, and consequently an eternal poetry in science. That very craving for the mysterious and the unknown which the human imagination feels, will appear, if we analyze it to the end, a disguised form of the desire to know. We have just spoken of the peculiar charm of narrow roads, of thickets, and turnings; the chief source of their charm is in their allowing us to make discoveries at every step, in their keeping the mind in a constant stretch of curiosity. The poetry in them does not come only from their closing the horizon to us, but rather from their always promising us something new. That science is constantly changing the points of view from which we have been in the habit of regarding men and things, that it keeps on producing new light-effects, and often surprises, and even vexes us, no one will deny; but what is there in that to disturb the poet? I have sometimes envied the ant, whose horizon is so narrow that it has to mount a leaf or a stone to see a half step around itself; it must be able to distinguish a host of things that wholly escape us; to it a gravel-walk, a piece of turf, the bark of a tree, are replete with poetries unknown to us. If its view were enlarged it would be at first unhomed, and in the sight of our forests and mountains would miss the fleeting shadows of its grass-blades. So if we were to rise high enough we should regret to see the poetry of details disappearing, the little things blending together, all the angles in which our thought was lost smoothed away, all the turns that excited our curiosity straightened out. Nothing, at first sight, but the view of a grand whole, bare and shadeless, in a harsh, uniform light; but what breadth! As we survey it, we see still beyond it, a new set of endless perspectives still losing themselves in the shadows; still something to look at, to learn, and to experiment upon.

There is another mystery which science can not destroy, and which is destined to be always a theme of poetry; the metaphysical mystery. There is no need of weaving, as the theologians do, new obscurities around the one that everlastingly envelops the beginning of things; having got to that, the investigator himself, obliged to stop, may suffer himself, as Claude Bernard says, "to be rocked in the wind of the unknown, amid the sublimities of ignorance." Science may dispel, without poetry suffering by it, the artificial mysteries of religions, which apply their symbols even to the explanation of purely scientific