edge cannot throw its illumination upon eternity, or dissipate
the influences by which men feel they are surrounded. A candle brought
into a darkened room discloses the material forms of the things in the
midst of which we are standing, and which may have been involved, to
our imagination, in a poetical mystery. But the light itself, as an
unexplained wonder--its analogies with the flame of life--the
modifications it receives from the faint gleam of the sky through the
shadowed window--all are poetical materials, and of a higher
character. Where one series of materials ends, another begins; and so
on in infinite progression, till poetry seems to spurn the earth from
beneath her foot--

Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt,
And in clear dream and solemn vision
Telling of things which no gross ear can hear;
Till oft converse with heavenly habitants
Begins to cast a beam on the outer shape--
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turn it by degrees to the soul's essence,
Till all be made immortal.

Science with us, however, is a business instead of an ambition;
ingenuity a trade rather than a taste. We go on from discovery to
discovery, from invention to invention, with an insatiate but prosaic
spirit, which turns everything to a profitable and practical
account--imprisoning the very lightning, that it may carry our
messages over land and under sea! We do not stop to look, to listen,
to feel, to exalt with a moral elevation the objects of our study, and
snatch a spiritual enjoyment from imagination. All with us is
material; and all would be even mean, but for the essential grandeur
of the things themselves. And here comes the question: Is this
material progress incompatible with spiritual progress? Is the poetry
of life less abundant because the conveniences of life are more
complete and admirable? Is man less a spirit of the universe because
he is a god over the elements? We answer, No: the scientific and the
prosaic spirit are both independent elements in the genius of the age;
or, if there is a necessary connection, it is the converse of what is
supposed--the restless mind in which the fervour of poetry has died,
plunging into science for the occupation that is necessary to its
happiness. Thus one age is merely poetical, another merely scientific;
although here, of course, we use, for the sake of distinctness, the
broadest terms, unmindful of the modifications ranging between t