“Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
  In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
  There I couch when owls do cry. 
  On the bat’s back I do fly,
  After summer, merrily.”

The peasant falls asleep some evening in a wood and his eyes are opened by a fairy wand, so that he sees the little goblins and imps dancing around him on the green sward, sitting on mushrooms, or in the heads of the flowers, drinking out of acorn-cups, fighting with blades of grass, and riding on grasshoppers.

So, too, the gallant knight, riding to save some poor oppressed maiden, dashes across the foaming torrent; and just in the middle, as he is being swept away, his eyes are opened, and he sees fairy water-nymphs soothing his terrified horse and guiding him gently to the opposite shore.  They are close at hand, these sprites, to the simple peasant or the gallant knight, or to anyone who has the gift of the fairies and can see them. but the man who scoffs at them, and does not believe in them or care for them, he never sees them.  Only now and then they play him an ugly trick, leading him into some treacherous bog and leaving him to get out as he may.

Now, exactly all this which is true of the fairies of our childhood is true too of the fairies of science.  There are forces around us, and among us, which I shall ask you to allow me to call fairies, and these are ten thousand times more wonderful, more magical, and more beautiful in their work, than those of the old fairy tales.  They, too, are invisible, and many people live and die without ever seeing them or caring to see them.  These people go about with their eyes shut, either because they will not open them, or because no one has taught them how to see.  They fret and worry over their own little work and their own petty troubles, and do not know how to rest and refresh themselves, by letting the fairies open their eyes and show them the calm sweet picture of nature.  They are like Peter Bell of whom Wordsworth wrote:-

 “A primrose by a river’s brim
  A yellow primrose was to him,
  And it was nothing more.”

But we will not be like these, we will open our eyes and ask, “What are these forces or fairies, and how can we see them?”

Just go out into the country, and sit down quietly and watch nature at work.  Listen to the wind as it blows, look at the clouds rolling overhead, and waves rippling on the pond at your feet.  Hearken to the brook as it flows by, watch the flower-buds opening one by one, and then ask yourself, “How all this is done?” Go out in the evening and see the dew gather drop by drop upon the grass, or trace the delicate hoar-frost crystals which bespangle every blade on a winter’s morning.  Look at the vivid flashes of lightening in a storm, and listen to the pealing thunder:  and then tell me, by what machinery is all this wonderful work done?  Man does none of it, neither could he stop it if he were to try; for it is all the work of those invisible forces or fairies whose acquaintance I wish you to make.  Day and night, summer and winter, storm or calm, these fairies are at work, and we may hear them and know them, and make friends of them if we will.