“My wise daughter, what do you think of it?” said M. Vermondans, speaking to Ebba, who, with her hands crossed over her chest with religious silence, sat looking at a phenomenon she had witnessed every winter, and which on every occasion awakened a new emotion.

Ebba said, “I do not know the dissertations of academies, like Eric.  Since, however, they do not explain the cause and motion of the aurora borealis, I had rather rely on the simple and religious traditions of an ignorant people, to that of the Greenlanders, who say that the rays of the aurora come from the glare of souls which wander over the skies.”

“On my soul,” said M. Vermondans, “that idea pleases me.  Like the problems of the natural philosophers, it does not explain the problem of the aurora-borealis, but it is much more poetical.  This tradition contributes to the assistance of an idea I advanced the other day, on the vanity of scientific speculations, especially when we compare them with the delicious conceptions of the ignorant.”

“True,” replied Eric, “in the infancy of nations, as in the childhood of the individual, there is a graceful poetry, an ideal and intellectual understanding of nature, which does not resist grave impressions or the reason of mature age.  Thus, amid the wild nations of North America, the poor mother who has lost a child, fancies that she scents the perfume of its breath in the flowers, and hears its sigh in the voices of the birds.  Thus is it that our Lapland neighbors attach a touching faith to many physical incidents.

“When one of them becomes ill, they say that his soul has been called to a better world by the loving beings he has lost; and that his soul is about to depart to yield to their prayers, and seek its final home with them.  Then they send for a sorcerer, who casts himself on his face on the ground, and in mysterious words beseeches the wandering soul to return.  If it yields to the supplications, if it returns to the tabernacle it has inhabited, the invalid recovers breath and strength; if not, he dies.  Such, and a variety of other examples, we find in every direction, in the wonderful tales of the east, in the popular traditions of the north, and they prove clearly enough that there are flowers of poetry and spring-like perfumes full of inimitable grace in all primitive societies, even where gross ignorance and coarse usages distress us.

“Think you though that science also is without poetry?  If you understand by poetry, what I think you do, every ennobling of thought, every exaltation of mind, do you think there is no lofty and grand poetry in that geology which searches into the bowels of the earth, and exhibits to you the different layers of which it is composed, and the revolutions it has undergone; in the researches of the naturalist, who exhibits the creations of an antediluvian world; in the observations of the astronomer, who explains the configuration and harmonious movements of those luminous orbs removed millions of miles from that on which we dwell?  Do you think there is no poetry in the material development of civilized societies, in the industrious activity which digs canals, pierces mountains, subdues the elements, and moves all to man’s will?”