announced by science, every profound poetic mind must have felt a thrill of pleasure.  Or the nebular hypothesis of the solar system,—­it seems the conception of some inspired madman, like William Blake, rather than the cool conclusion of reason, and to carry its own justification, as great power always does.  Indeed, our interest in astronomy and geology is essentially a poetic one,—­ the love of the marvelous, of the sublime, and of grand harmonies.  The scientific conception of the sun is strikingly Dantesque, and appalls the imagination.  Or the hell of fire through which the earth has passed, and the aeons of monsters from which its fair forms have emerged,—­from which of the seven circles of the Inferno did the scientist get his hint?  Indeed, science everywhere reveals a carnival of mightier gods than those that cut such fantastic tricks in the ancient world.  Listen to Tyndall on light, or to Youmans on the chemistry of a sunbeam, and see how fable pales its ineffectual fires, and the boldest dreams of the poets are eclipsed.

The vibratory theory of light and its identity with the laws of sound, the laws of the tides and the seasons, the wonders of the spectroscope, the theory of gravitation, of electricity, of chemical affinity, the deep beneath deep of the telescope, the world within world of the microscope,—­in these and many other fields it is hard to tell whether it is the scientist or the poet we are listening to.  What greater magic than that you can take a colorless ray of light, break it across a prism, and catch upon a screen all the divine hues of the rainbow?

In some respects science has but followed out and confirmed the dim foreshadowings of the human breast.  Man in his simplicity has called the sun father and the earth mother.  Science shows this to be no fiction, but a reality; that we are really children of the sun, and that every heart-beat, every pound of force we exert, is a solar emanation.  The power with which you now move and breathe came from the sun just as literally as the bank-notes in your pocket came from the bank.

The ancients fabled the earth as resting upon the shoulders of Atlas, and Atlas as standing upon a turtle; but what the turtle stood upon was a puzzle.  An acute person says that science has but changed the terms of the equation, but that the unknown quantity is the same as ever.  The earth now rests upon the sun,—­in his outstretched palm; the sun rests upon some other sun, and that upon some other; but what they all finally rest upon, who can tell?  Well may Tennyson speak of the “fairy tales of science,” and well may Walt Whitman say:—­

 “I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the
     reasons of things;
  They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen.”