Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/280

272 For a poison malign

Is such Borgia wine,

Or at best but a Devil's Elixir.

While pure as a spring

Is the wine I sing,

And to praise it, one needs but name it;

For Catawba wine

Has need of no sign,

No tavern-bush to proclaim it.

And this Song of the Vine,

This greeting of mine,

The winds and the birds shall deliver

To the Queen of the West,

In her garlands dressed,

On the banks of the Beautiful River.

eloquent philosopher, depicting the deplorable results that would follow, if some future materialist were "to succeed in displaying to us a mechanical system of the human mind, as comprehensive, intelligible, and satisfactory as the Newtonian mechanism of the heavens," exclaims, "Fallen from their elevation, Art and Science and Virtue would no longer be to man the objects of a genuine and reflective adoration." We are led, in reflecting upon the far more probable success of the meteorologist, to similar forebodings upon the dulness and sameness to which social intercourse will be reduced when the weather philosophers shall succeed in subjecting the changes of the atmosphere to rules and predictions,—when the rain shall fall where it is expected, the wind blow no longer "where it listeth," and wayward man no longer find his counterpart in nature. But we console ourselves by contemplating the difficulties of the problem, and the improbability, that, in our generation at least, we shall be deprived of these subjects of general news and universal interest.

During the last half-century, the progress of experimental philosophy in the direction of the weather, though its results are for the most part of a negative character, has yet been sufficient to excite the apprehensions of the philanthropist. We have unlearned many fables and false theories, and have made great advancement in that knowledge of our ignorance, which is the only true foundation of positive science.

The moon has been deposed from the executive chair, though she still has her supporters and advocates; and an