ation. If our misguided young
friend had been thoroughly grounded in Paley's Evidences and scientific
primers--for these should never be separated--do you think we should
have heard anything about his chaotic soul? Not a bit of it. It would
all have been as clear as an opera-glass, or as Mr. Joseph Cook's
theory of Solar Light. Why didn't his parents give him my "Mathematical
Exposition of Orthodoxy for Children," or my "The Theology of Euclid,"
on his birthdays, instead of Hans Andersen's "Fairy Tales" and the
"Tales from the Norse?" It was very remiss of them.'

'On the contrary,' said the professor, 'I should have recommended the
entire elimination of doctrinal matter from his studies. I should have
guided him to a thorough investigation of the principle of all the
Natural Sciences, with especial devotion to one single branch, as Botany
or Conchology, and an entire mastery of its terminology I should have
urged our gifted but destitute of all scientific method friend to
the observation and definition of objective phenomena, rather than to
subjective analysis, and turned his reflections--'

'Flow, my words!' said the poet dreamily. 'Soar, my mind!'

He had flung himself into the solitary armchair in a graceful and
distraught pose, and with half-closed eyes had fallen into a reverie.
The divine and the professor stood and gazed at him despondently.

'Such,' said the divine, 'are the consequences of the lack of sound
ethical and eclectic principles in our day and generation!'

'Such,' said the professor, 'are the pernicious results of a classical
training, the absence of a spirit of scientific research and a broad and
philosophical mental culture.'

Those readers who have not yet perused the poet's sonnet may recognise
it, of course, by the first line:

'Fair denizen of deathless ether, doomed.'

It attracted a good deal of attention at the time. The public were
informed, in the 'Athaeenum,' that the poet was engaged on a sonnet, and
the literary world was excited, but, not having the key, could not make
out what on earth it meant. Meanwhile the professor's paper in 'Nature,'
which appeared in the course of the same week, being written from a
wholly different standpoint, did not tend to elucidate the mystery. The
latter merely described the locality in which the fairy, or butterfly,
as the professor called it, was found, and the circumstances of its
capture and escape, with such an account of its manifold p