1850.] William C. Bennett. 51 We know of nothing in its way more alive with music than the following. "THE SKYLARK. "Quiverer up the golden air, Nested in a golden earth, Mate of hours when thrushes pair, Hedges green, and blooms have birth, – Up, thou very shout of joy; Gladness wert thou made to fling Up, through morning, soar and sing. "Shade by shade hath gloom decreased, "Up,―thy utterance silence robs "Up,- no white star hath the west,- Up, up, away; the primrose lights the lane, Up, the boughs with gladness ring; Drooped with bees, O, soar and sing! "Ah! at last thou beat'st the sun, Leaving low thy nest of love; Wheel on wheel, the white day through, Steep on steep of airy blue Fling me up, and soar and sing! "Spurner of the earth's annoy, O, might I be tempest-tost! - Of thy rapture I might fling Down, till earth should swoon from pain, - And with this keen and glowing tribute from Mr. Bennett's heart to a buried bard, we leave this nest of poetbrethren with our readers. "SONNET.-TO KEATS. "O nightingale, thou wert for golden Junes, With smiles, not sighs, thy days should have been rife, - Thee, nature fashioned like the belted bee, Roamer of sunshine, fellow of the flowers, Hiving up honeyed sweets for man, to see No touch of tears in all thy radiant hours; Perhaps neither of the authors whose volumes we have thus briefly mentioned could ever achieve an epic or a tragedy. But what they have written is none the less worthy of a welcome. To indite a song or a sonnet which shall quicken the pulse and warm the heart, which shall go sounding on into the soul of the reader, and leave, like spring, "no corner of the land untouched," — this is surely an art worth attaining, and one de 1850.] Baron Humboldt's Cosmos. 53 serving the world's best praise. There are occasions in the life of every one when the louder and loftier measures of the lyre sound like discords, "out of tune and harsh." There are pauses in the swift-winged flight of time, when the calmer strains of poesy come with a singular sweetness to the weary, fainting pilgrim. It is for such moments that Swain, and Hervey, and Alford, with others of a kindred genius, are living, to cheer, and soften, and purify with a human tenderness the throbbing heart of man. J. T. F. ART. IV. BARON HUMBOLDT'S COSMOS.* Ir the modesty of an age were commensurate with its ignorance, if its aim were proportioned to its ability to perform, then we might expect that a Cosmos, or a sketch of a physical description of the universe, would be among the latest attempts of the human mind. But, in every generation, there have been men of self-confi dence, who, elated by the little acquisitions which had been made in positive knowledge, were unable or unwilling to fathom the deep abysses of human ignorance. They have ever been ready to discourse on the structure and workings of this great universe of matter, and expound even the act of creation. By a rich and magical style of description, by poetical fancies, by native vigor of thought, or by a brilliant imagination, they have entranced their readers, and concealed from them the meagreness of the positive information dispensed with their charm. Not only the majestic march of the phenomena of nature, but the origin of this matchless order and harmony, was the object of contemplation and description at an early period of man's intellectual development. If this array of material things were brought into exist ence, partly at least, for the delight and study of man, Cosmos: a Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe. By ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. Translated from the German by E. C. OTTÉ. London: Henry G. Bohn. 1849. 2 vols. 12mo. pp. 742. the human mind has been moulded, without doubt, with principles of perception and thought in harmony with it. The highest intellectual view which man ever gains of nature is when he penetrates to its mechanism. Then he beholds it as an exquisitely ordered, though wonderfully complex machine, animated by manifold forces, and unfolding in quiet accordance with those mechanical laws which are inseparably entwined with his fundamental conceptions of matter and motion in relation to force. Some suppose that these primal conceptions do not grow up spontaneously in the mind, but that they are deductions from experience and observation, so that, if nature had moved on by different laws, reason would not have contradicted this new order of things, but have been developed in harmony with it. Others enlarge the prerogatives of the human mind, and give it sovereignty over all outward impressions. In their view, the general laws of mechanics, as understood by minds most highly cultivated in the science, are necessary truths, and a universe in which they were violated would not be fitted for the education of man. Upon this hypothesis, even, who shall say how much of the development of these ideas must be conceded to the unassisted struggles of the mind itself, and how much is prompted by the kindly suggestions of an indulgent nature, made transparent and luminous in the abundant facts of modern science? Tycho Brahe and Galileo, Descartes and Leibnitz, Huyghens and Newton, rejected, each in his turn, what are now held among the commonplaces of science. What imperfect notions of mechanical principles must Galileo have had at one time, to suppose that a magnetic force was requisite, in some point of external space, to keep the earth poised and pointing ever in the same steadfast direction! But whatever be the origin of those elementary and far-reaching principles of mechanical reasoning to which we have referred, they alone are not sufficient to reveal the Cosmos to us. These principles teach us the relations which exist between force and its effects, particularly its most remarkable effect, which is motion. Even if the laws of motion are necessary, the forces which produce motion, such as gravitation, for example, are not necessary. They might have been different from what 1850.] Discoveries of the Plan of Nature. 55 they are in fact. These forces originate in God and dwell in God. We cannot go beyond this origin, neither can we stop short of it. Physical science discusses, not so much the origin of these forces as the mysterious play of their effects. If the devotee of Science, amazed at her grand developments and exalted by her comprehensive generalizations, pauses to inquire in regard to the stability of this goodly edifice which human reason has constructed, he receives no satisfactory answer except in the idea of God. Those branches of science which are most mature, and are already redolent with their ripened fruits, are best understood when regarded as fragmentary sketches of the plan by which God acts. Whenever, in the course of observation or experiment, new discoveries are made, Science enlarges her ideas of the compass of this plan so as to include the strange facts. The plan of nature has not been infringed, but Science has caught another glimpse of the extent, the beauty, and the significance of this plan. The laws of motion are not violated, but new forces are betrayed to our astonished eyes, the conception of which is sufficient to remove the anomaly and reconcile apparent discrepancies. The human mind rests satisfied with this view of the problem of nature, because it always finds, after a closer scrutiny into the past, or the remote, or the obscure, that these forces, imagined for the present emergency, always existed and always acted, often in the most familiar processes, although their silent and unobtrusive, but irresistible, action was overlooked. Large subdivisions of science are built upon forces whose existence was not suspected half a century ago. These forces, and who shall say what others yet to be discovered, lay concealed in the uncleared fields of science: as the planets Uranus and Neptune were buried in the old star-catalogues of Flamsteed and Lalande, though destined one day to burst on the scientific gaze of the astronomer in all their planetary beauty. Science gives no indications that a single new and permanent force has ever been introduced into the arena, where atom conflicts with atom, not, as man contends with man, to desolate the earth, but rather to fertilize and beautify it. Science does not suggest the suspicion that these curious forces which play such important parts before our eyes |