Our young writer is more at his ease now:--
Science, of course, is literal, as it ought to be, but science is
not life; science takes no note of this finer self, this duplicate
on a higher scale. Science never laughs or cries, or whistles or
sings, or falls in love, or sees aught but the coherent reality.
It says a soap bubble is a soap bubble--a drop of water impregnated
with oleate of potash or soda, and inflated with common air; but
life says it is a crystal sphere, dipped in the rainbow, buoyant as
hope, sensitive as the eye, with a power to make children dance for
joy, and to bring youth into the look of the old. . . .
Who in his youth ever saw the swallow of natural history to be the
twittering, joyous bird that built mud nests beneath his father's
shed, and in the empty odorous barn?--that snapped the insects that
flew up in his way when returning at twilight from the upland farm;
and that filled his memory with such visions of summer when he
first caught its note on some bright May morning, flying up the
southern valley? Describe water, or a tree, in the language of
exact science, or as they really are in and of themselves, and
what person, schooled only in nature, would recognize them? Things
must be given as they seem, as they stand represented in the mind.
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