Shortly, what is it but the fiery coach,

Which the youth sought, and sought his death withal Or the boy's wings, which, when he did approach

The sun's hot beams, did melt and let him fall

And yet, alas! when all our lamps are burn'd,
Our bodies wasted, and our spirits spent;
When we have all the learned volumes turn'd,
Which yield men's wits both help and ornament;
What can we know, or what can we discern,

When error chokes the windows of the mind?
The divers forms of things how can we learn,
That have been ever from our birth-day blind?
When Reason's lamp, which, like the sun in sky,
Throughout man's little world her beams did spread,
Is now become a sparkle, which doth lio

Under the ashes, half extinct and dead;

How can we hope that through the eye and ear
This dying sparkle, in this cloudy place,
Can recollect these beams of knowledge clear,
Which were infus'd in the first minds by grace?
So might the heir, whose father hath in play
Wasted a thousand pound of ancient rent,
Dy painful earning of one groat a day,

Hope to restore the patrimony spent.

The wits that div'd most deep and soar'd most high,
Seeking man's pow'rs, have found his weakness such ·
Skill comes so slow, and life so fast doth fly;

We learn so little, and forget so much;

For this the wisest of all moral men

Said, He knew nought, but that he nought did know; And the great mocking master mock'd not then, When he said, Truth was buried deep below,

For how may we to other things attain,

When none of us his own soul understands For which the devil mocks our curious brain, When, Know thyself, his oracle commands. For why should we the busy soul believe,

When boldly she concludes of that and this, When of herself she can no judgment give,

Nor how, nor whence, nor where, nor what she is?

All things without, which round about we see,
We seek to know, and how therewith to do:

But that whereby we reason, live, and be,

Within ourselves, we strangers are thereto.

We seek to know the moving of each sphere,

And the strange cause of th' ebbs and floods of Nile;

But of that clock within our breasts we bear,
The subtile motions we forget the while.
We that acquaint ourselves with every zone,
And pass both tropics, and behold both poles,
When we come home, are to ourselves unknown,
And unacquainted still with our own souls,
We study speech, but others we persuade;

We leech-craft learn, but others cure with it; We interpret laws which other men have made, But read not those which in our hearts are writ. It is because the mind is like the eye,

Through which it gathers knowledge by degrees; Whose rays reflect not, but spread outwardly

Not seeing itself, when other things it sces.

No, doubtless: for the mind can backward cast
Upon herself her understanding light;
But she is so corrupt, and so defac'd,

And her own image doth herself affright:

As is the fable of the lady fair,

Which for her lust was turn'd into a cow
When thirsty to a stream she did repair,
And saw herself transform'd, she wist not how,

At first she startles, then she stands amaz'd;

At last with terror she from thence doth fly, And loaths the watery glass wherein she gaz'd, And shuns it still, though she for thirst do die. Even so man's soul, which did God's image bear, And was at first fair, good, and spotless pure, Since with her sins her beauties blotted were, Doth of all sights her own sight least endure:

For even at first reflection she espies

Such strange chimeras, and such monsters there, Such toys, such antics, and such vanities,

As she retires and shrinks for shame and fear.

And as the man loves least at home to be,

That hath a sluttish house, haunted with sprites; So she, impatient her own faults to see,

Turns from herself, and in strange things delights,
For this, few know themselves: for merchants broke,
View their estate with discontent and pain
And seas are troubled, when they do revoke
Their flowing waves into themselves again.

And while the face of outward things we find
Pleasing and fair, agreeable and sweet,
These things transport, and carry out the mind,
That with herself herself can never meet.

Yet if Affliction once her wars begin,

And threat the feeble Sense with sword and fire, The mind contracts herself, and shrinketh in,

And to herself she gladly doth retire;

As spiders touch'd seek their web's inmost part;
As bees in storms unto their hives return;
As blood in danger gathers to the heart;

As men seek towns, when foes the country burn.

If ought can teach us ought, Affliction's looks,
Making us look unto ourselves so near,
Teach us to know ourselves beyond all books,
Or all the learned schools that ever were.

This mistress lately pluck'd me by the ear,

And many a golden lesson hath me taught ;
Hath made my senses quick, and reason clear,
Reform'd my will, and rectified my thought.

So do the winds and thunder cleanse the air;
So working lees settle and purge the wine;
So lopp'd and pruned trees do flourish fair;
So doth the fire the drossy gold refine.

Neither Minerva, nor the learned Muse,

Nor rules of art, nor precepts of the wise,
Could in my brain those beams of skill infuse,
As but the glance of this dame's angry eyes.

She within lists my ranging mind hath brought,
That now beyond myself I will not go :
Myself am centre of my circling thought,
Only myself I study, learn, and know.

I know my body's of so frail a kind,

As force without, fevers within, can kill
I know the heavenly nature of my mind,
But 'tis corrupted both in wit and will.

I know my soul hath power to know all things,
Yet is she blind and ignorant in all :

I know I'm one of Nature's little kings,
Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

I know my life's a pain, and but a span ;

I know my sense is mock'd with every thing;

And, to conclude, I know myself a man,

Which is a proud, and yet a wretched, thing.

[ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, the celebrated German traveller and philosopher, was born on the 14th September, 1769. His early education was at Göttingen; and the practical character of his studies and acquirements was determined in the mining school of Treyburg. Every region of science has been explored by him, not only as the abstracted student, but as the diligent and enterprising observer of nature in many climes. The great work of his latest years is 'Cosmos, a sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe,' from which the following is an extract.]

THE study of a science that promises to lead us through the vast range of creation may be compared to a journey in a far distant land. Before we set forth we consider, and often with distrust, our own strength and that of the guide we have chosen. But the apprehensions which have originated in the abundance and the difficulties attached to the subjects we would embrace, recede from view as we remember that with the increase of observations in the present day, there has also arisen a more intimate knowledge of the connection existing among all phenomena. It has not unfrequently happened, that the researches made at remote distances have often and unexpectedly thrown light upon subjects which had long resisted the attempts made to explain them, within the narrow limits of our own sphere of observation. Organic forms that had long remained isolated, both in the animal and vegetable kingdom, have been connected by the discovery of intermediate links or stages of transition. The geography of beings endowed with life attains completeness, as we see the species, genera, and entire families belonging to our hemisphere, reflected, as it were, in analogous animal and vegetable forms in the opposite hemisphere. There are, so to speak, the equivalents which mutually personate and replace one another in the great series of organisms. These connecting links and stages of transition may be traced, alternately, in a deficiency or an excess of development of certain parts, in the mode of junction of distinct organs, in the differences in the balance of forces, or in a resemblance to intermediate forms which are not permanent, but merely characteristic of certain phases of normal development. Passing from the consideration of beings endowed with life to that of inorganic bodies, we find many striking illustrations of the high state of advancement to which modern geology has attained. We thus see, according to the grand views of Elie de Beaumont, how chains of mountains dividing different climates and floras and different races of men, reveal to us their relative age, both by the character of the sedimentary strata they have uplifted, and by the directions which they follow over the long fissures with which the earth's crust is furrowed. Relations of super-positions of trachyte and of syenitic porphyry, of diosite and of serpentine, which remain doubtful when considered in the auriferous soil of Hungary, in the rich platinum districts of the Oural, and on the south-western declivity of the Siberian Altaï, are elucidated by the observations that have been made on the plateaux of Mexico and 4TH QUARTER,

G

Antioquia, and in the unhealthy ravines of Choes. The most important facts on which the physical history of the world has been based in modern times, have not been accumulated by chance. It has at length been fully acknowledged, and the conviction is characteristic of the age, that the narrative of distant travels, too long occupied in the mere recital of hazardous adventures, can only be made a source of instruction, where the traveller is acquainted with the condition of the science he would enlarge, and is guided by reason in his researches.

It is by the tendency to generalization, which is only dangerous in its abuse, that a great portion of the physical knowledge already acquired may be made the common property of all classes of society; but in order to render the instruction imparted by these means commensurate with the importance of the subject, it is desirable to deviate as widely as possible from the imperfect compilations designated, till the close of the eighteenth century, by the inappropriate term of popular knowledge. I take pleasure in persuading myself that scientific subjects may be treated of in language at once dignified, grave and animated, and that those who are restricted within the circumscribed limits of ordinary life, and have long remained strangers to an intimate communion with nature, may thus have opened to them one of the richest sources of enjoyment of which the mind is invigorated by the acquisition of new ideas. Communion with nature awakens within us perceptive faculties that had long lain dormant; and we thus comprehend at a single glance the influence exercised by physical discoveries on the enlargement of the sphere of intellect, and perceive how a judicious application of mechanics, chemistry, and other sciences may be made conducive to national prosperity.

A more accurate knowledge of the connection of physical phenomena will also tend to remove the prevalent error that all branches of natural science are not equally important in relation to general cultivation and industrial progress. An arbitrary distinction is frequently made between the various degrees of importance appertaining to mathematical sciences, to the study of organised beings, the knowledge of electro-magnetism, and investigations of the general properties of matter in its different conditions of molecular aggregation; and it is not uncommon presumptuously to affix a supposed stigma upon researches of this nature, by terming them "purely theoretical," forgetting, although the fact has been long attested, that in the observation of a phenomenon, which at first sight appears to be wholly isolated, may be concealed the germ of a great discovery. When Aloysio Galvani first stimulated the nervous fibre by the accidental contact of two heterogeneous metals, his contemporaries could never have anticipated that the action of the voltaic pile would discover to us, in the alkalies, metals of a silvery lustre, so light as to swim on water, and eminently inflammable; or that it would become a powerful instrument of chemical analysis, and at the same time a thermoscope, and a magnet. When Huyghens first observed, in 1678, the phenomenon of the polarization of light, exhibited in the difference between the two rays into which a pencil of light divides itself in passing through a doubly refracting crystal, it could not have been foreseen, that a century and a half later the great philosopher, Arago, would by his discovery of chromatic polarization, be led to discern, by means of a small fragment of Iceland spar, whether solar light emanates from a solid body, or a gaseous covering; or whether comets transmit light directly, or merely by reflection.

An equal appreciation of all branches of the mathematical, physical and natural sciences, is a special requirement of the present age, in which the material wealth, and the growing prosperity of nations, are principally based upon a more enlightened employment of the products and forces of nature. The most superficial glance at the present condition of Europe, shows that a diminution or even a total annihilation of national prosperity, must be the award of those states who shrink