Hunt's Poetry of Science.

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ART. IV.-1. The Poetry of Science; or, Studies of the Physical Phenomena of Nature. By ROBERT HUNT, Keeper of Mining Records, Museum of Practical Geology. Second Edition. 1849. Pp. 478.

2. Researches on Light: An Examination of all the Phenomena connected with the Chemical and Molecular changes produced by the influence of the Solar Rays; embracing all the known Photographic Processes and New Discoveries in the Art. By ROBERT HUNT, Secretary to the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society. London, 1844.

3. Panthea, the Spirit of Nature. By ROBERT HUNT, Author of "The Poetry of Science," "Researches on Light," &c. &c. London, 1849.

THAT there is poetry in science will be admitted by those who have but little faith in its truths and little knowledge of its wonders. The poetry of flowers has been the theme of writers who know them merely by their odours and by their hues; and the poetry of animals has been celebrated by authors who have seen them only within their prisons of stone or their cages of iron. Even the moon, with her pallid face and her cold radiations, has been signalized as the very paradise of poetical sentiment, outstripping the God of Day in her influence over our feelings, and extinguishing in her lyric blaze all the sentimental glimmerings of the tiny and the distant stars. To the Queen of Night we cheerfully yield the most respectful and affectionate homage; but even with our native tendencies to resign ourselves to female power, whether it is wielded by the pen or by the sceptre, we must dissent from a judgment founded either on a weak astronomical faith, or on a feeble apprehension of the glorious destinies of our species. The difference between the poetry inspired by the satellite of silver and the stars of adamant can have no relation, as has been supposed, to our ideas of distance or number. Were the moon a ball of marble in our upper atmosphere, chiselled by the sculptor into her rounded hollows and her mountain ridges or were it a Cheshire cheese at a lower level, dimpled by the fingers of the dairymaid, she would still be invested with all the poetical feelings with which her light is associated. To

“The sun is less poetical than the moon, because his attributes are less exclusively connected with our mental perceptions. The light of the sun is also too clear and too generally pervading in its nature to be so poetical as that of the moon. But the stars some may ask, are they not sufficiently distant and magnificent for sublimity-mild enough for purity-beautiful enough for love? Yes, but they are too distant, too pure, too cold for human love. They come not near our troubled world--they smile not upon us like the moon."-Miss Stickney's (Mrs. Ellis) Poetry of Lije, vol. i. pp. 157, 158.

the vulgar, or to the merely poetical eye, the stars appear as close to us as the moon; and whether we contemplate them merely as solitary lights in the firmament, or as grouped into brilliant constellations, they suggest none of those ideas of deep feeling and sublime emotion which are associated with the past, the present, and the future condition of our race. Their feeble and glimmering ray, dimmed by each rising exhalation, and paling even before the zephyr's breath, has failed to arrest the eye of the poet, or to stud the canvas of the painter. It has never gilded the ripple of the mountain lake, nor crested with silver the ocean wave. It has never lighted the lover to his mistress, nor the pilgrim to his shrine, nor the hero to his deed of glory. But no sooner does philosophy, with her magic wand, marshal the starry host, and arrange their planets and satellites into the glorious systems of worlds which fill the immensity of space, than faith "takes up the wondrous tale," and associates with these bright abodes the future fortunes of immortal and regenerated man. It places there the loved and the lost-it follows them into the celestial bowers-it joins them in the anthem to "mortal minstrelsy unknown"-it listens to their welcoming or their warning voice; and while it gives a visible locality to the home of many mansions, it assembles round its joyous hearth hearts once severed and broken; and longs to wander beside the "rivers of the waters of life," with the sages that enlightened it-the prophets that expounded it-the warriors that fought for it-the martyrs that suffered for it—and the noble victims that bled in its cause. The poetry of death and the grave is thus succeeded by the loftier strains of the Resurrection and the Life; and the Fountain of Helicon is thus made to draw its purest waters from springs that rise from below, and from dews that descend from above.

But though poetical feelings of the most exalted kind are awakened by the contemplation of the stars as the future abode of the blest, they can bear no relation to the beauty and grandeur of the objects themselves. They derive their character as well as their power from their association with life in all its phases of grief or joy, and with human interests and passions in all their reckless energy or heavenward aspirations. Sirius, the brightest of the stars, radiating in succession all the hues of the rainbow, and Saturn, the most interesting of the planets, girded with his noble ring, and enlightened by his seven satellites, have in themselves no more of the spirit of poetry than a charcoal point ignited by electricity, or a gas-illuminated representation of the planet.

His Majesty George III, promised to the Russian ambassador, when on a visit at Windsor, to shew him Saturn and his ring through the great telescope of Sir W. Herschel. The weather, however, was unpropitious, and despairing of a clear sky before the ambassador took his leave, the facetious monarch got a repre

Poetry of the Stars and Planets.

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But no sooner do we regard Sirius as the sun which enlightens by its rays and guides by its mass a system of planetary worlds; and no sooner is Saturn viewed as a habitable globe, the residence of intellectual and immortal beings, and illuminated by seven moons which give them light in the absence of the sun, than the sensation in the membrane of the eye is transferred to the tablet of the heart, and all the sympathies of our nature surround the conception of worlds more glorious, and of races more numerous and noble than our own. The imagination takes up the theme where reason and analogy leave it, and the living and breathing universe of the poet offers to the child of clay eternity in exchange for time-to the man of sorrows a refuge from the storms and earthquakes around him-to the sage the fellowship of angels -and to the saint the guardian care of the seraph and the cherubim. The chariots of flame and the horses of fire that bore Elijah from his star of earth, and surrounded Elisha on the mountains of Syria, and the wheels of amber and of fire which were exhibited to the captive prophet on the banks of the Chebar, become in the poet's eye the vehicle from planet to planet, and from star to star, in which the heavenly host is to survey the wonders and glories of the universe.

"Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

If in your bright leaves we would read the fate
Of men and empires,-'tis to be forgiven,
That in our aspirations to be great,

Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state,
And claim a kindred with you; for ye are
A beauty and a mystery, and create
In us such love and reverence from afar,

That fortune, fame, power, life have named themselves a star."

Childe Harold, iii. 88.

""Tis midnight; on the mountain's brow
The cold round moon shines deeply down;
Blue roll the waters, blue the sky
Spreads like an ocean hung on high,
Bespangled with these isles of light,
So wildly spiritually bright.
Who ever gazed upon them shining,
And turned to earth without repining?
Nor wished for wings to flee away,
And mix with their eternal ray."

Siege of Corinth, xi.

sentation of the planet in paper suspended from a tree, and illuminated by a lamp. The Ambassador was delighted with the phenomenon; but we have not learned that he left any poetical account of his feelings.

We have been led to make these observations by the remarkable title, "The Poetry of Science," which Mr. Hunt has prefixed to his very interesting work on the Studies of the Phenomena of Nature. Adopting, as we readily do, all his views of the importance and grandeur of scientific truth, and admiring the energy both of sentiment and language in which he vindicates for science the lofty character of being the essence of all poetry, and the basis of all philosophy, we have not been able to look at the realities of matter with the same enthusiastic eye, or to reach his conclusion that every scientific truth is essentially poetical, or, as he beautifully expresses it, "that to be for ever true is the science of poetry," and that "the revelation of truth is the poetry of science." But though we may adduce some rational grounds for our more limited appreciation of the poetry of the physical world, we are disposed to regard our difference with Mr. Hunt more as the result of temperament than of reason. He was a poet before he was a philosopher ;-he had drunk of the Castalian spring before he had analyzed it ;he had worshipped in the Temple of the Muses before he knew of what marble it was built; and he had climbed the Pierian hill while he was ignorant of the geology at its base.

There are certainly some facts in natural science, in its widest acceptation, which are utterly devoid of poetical sentiment, and others which stand in direct antagonism to any feeling allied to poetry. It is only the more picturesque fragments of scientific truth that the poet can assimilate, and it is only amid its more extensive generalizations, associated with life, that he can gather the flowers of his art. Had the huge and water-worn boulder of science been rolled by some imaginative Sysiphus to the top of Parnassus, it would have formed an unpoetic addition to its two picturesque summits, and, ere its surface had been encrusted with the moss or the lichen, Apollo and the Muses would have sent it bounding to its native plains.

A writer of great merit and fine taste has taken the very opposite view that Mr. Hunt does of physical science in its poetical relations. "The power of poetry," says Miss Stickney, (Mrs. Ellis,) "to refine our views of life and happiness is more and more needed as society advances. It is needed to withstand the encroachments of heartless and artificial manners, which makes civilisation so tame and uninteresting. It is needed to counteract the tendency of physical science, which being now sought, not as formerly for intellectual gratification, but for multiplying bodily comforts, requires a new development of imagination, taste, and poetry to preserve men from sinking into an earthly, material, epicurean life." The gifted author of these

* Poetry of Life, by Sarah Stickney, vol. i. p. 19.

Physical Science not utilitarian in its objects.

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sentiments has mistaken the very nature and object of physical science. When Galileo discovered the satellites of Jupiter, and when Newton studied the lunar motions, they never thought that the mariner would be thus guided across the deep. When Oersted discovered the electro-magnetic principle, he did not foresee that it was to transmit with the velocity of lightning the messages of love and of war. In his analysis of coal the chemist did not propose to himself to light our houses and our streets with one of its gaseous elements. Nor did the botanist, when he studied the secretions of the poppy, anticipate the amount of pain and of anguish which his anodyne would alleviate. Philosophers have never assumed the character of utilitarians or philanthropists. Theirs is the loftier aim to unfold the wonders of Divine skill, and to develop the laws of the Divine Government; and if, in the exercise of this high vocation, they can multiply human comforts, or diminish human suffering, or lengthen human life, they rejoice in thus bearing testimony to the great truth, so clearly established in the history of modern civilisation -that there is in science no inquiry so recondite, and no speculation so daring, that we may not expect from it some useful result,--some new power over matter and the elements,—some new accession to our social blessings, or some welcome relief from our social miseries. This power and these blessings poetry is neither asked to give, nor required to counteract; and it will be better that "imagination is not farther developed" if it has no higher object than to obstruct the philosopher in the exercise of his functions when they are calculated to increase the material comforts of domestic and social life.

Avoiding, therefore, the two extremes of making all science poetical, and of making science the very enemy of poetry, we shall now proceed to give our readers some account of the important work in which the "poetry of science" is so ably vindicated, and the physical phenomena of nature so popularly and eloquently expounded.

Mr. Hunt, the author of the three works placed at the head of this Article, is one of those remarkable men about whom we wish to know more than can be gathered from their writings. This laudable curiosity it is often difficult to gratify. The philosopher who works at noon and at midnight is seldom placed before the public eye, and we hear of him only when the voice of fame proclaims the success of his works, or the merit of his discoveries. The annual reunion of scientific men at the meetings of the British Association has, among its other advantages, made the cultivators of science better acquainted with each other. Differences of rank and of reputation disappear in the councils of philosophy; and the young competitor for fame, scarcely known. beyond his family circle, pursuing knowledge perchance under