bargained and scolded and made love, good enough for him, and out of the
world around him made a poem such as no Roman ever sang.

In our day, it is said despairingly, the understanding reigns
triumphant: it is the age of common sense. If this be so, the wisest way
would be to accept it manfully. But, after all, what is the meaning of
it? Looking at the matter superficially, one would say that a striking
difference between our science and that of the world's gray fathers is
that there is every day less and less of the element of wonder in it.
What they saw written in light upon the great arch of heaven, and, by a
magnificent reach of sympathy, of which we are incapable, associated
with the fall of monarchs and the fate of man, is for us only a
professor, a piece of chalk, and a blackboard. The solemn and
unapproachable skies we have vulgarized; we have peeped and botanized
among the flowers of light, pulled off every petal, fumbled in every
calyx, and reduced them to the bare stem of order and class. The stars
can no longer maintain their divine reserves, but whenever there is a
conjunction and congress of planets, every enterprising newspaper sends
thither its special reporter with his telescope. Over those arcana of
life where once a mysterious presence brooded, we behold scientific
explorers skipping like so many incarnate notes of interrogation. We pry
into the counsels of the great powers of nature, we keep our ears at the
keyhole, and know everything that is going to happen. There is no longer
any sacred inaccessibility, no longer any enchanting unexpectedness, and
life turns to prose the moment there is nothing unattainable. It needs
no more a voice out of the unknown proclaiming "Great Pan is dead!" We
have found his tombstone, deciphered the arrow-headed inscription upon
it, know his age to a day, and that he died universally regretted.

Formerly science was poetry. A mythology which broods over us in our