cradle, which mingles with the lullaby of the nurse, which peoples the
day with the possibility of divine encounters, and night with intimation
of demonic ambushes, is something quite other, as the material for
thought and poetry, from one that we take down from our bookshelves, as
sapless as the shelf it stood on, as remote from all present sympathy
with man or nature as a town history with its genealogies of Mr.
Nobody's great-grandparents.

We have utilized everything. The Egyptians found a hint of the solar
system in the concentric circles of the onion, and revered it as a
symbol, while we respect it as a condiment in cookery, and can pass
through all Weathersfield without a thought of the stars. Our world is a
museum of natural history; that of our forefathers was a museum of
supernatural history. And the rapidity with which the change has been
going on is almost startling, when we consider that so modern and
historical a personage as Queen Elizabeth was reigning at the time of
the death of Dr. John Faustus, out of whose story the Teutonic
imagination built up a mythus that may be set beside that of Prometheus.

Science, looked at scientifically, is bare and bleak enough. On those
sublime heights the air is too thin for the lungs, and blinds the eyes.
It is much better living down in the valleys, where one cannot see
farther than the next farmhouse. Faith was never found in the bottom of
a crucible, nor peace arrived at by analysis or synthesis. But all this
is because science has become too grimly intellectual, has divorced
itself from the moral and imaginative part of man. Our results are not
arrived at in that spirit which led Kepler (who had his theory-traps set
all along the tracks of the stars to catch a discovery) to say, "In my
opinion the occasions of new discoveries have been no less wonderful
than the discoveries themselves."