University of Virginia Library

The revelation of an element,
Its accidents and forms—What else is meant
By that established phrase, “the visible world?”
What but a single element unfurled
And manifested to a single sense?

Is tangible creation more immense,
More multiform than the domain of Light,
That visible creation which the sight
Holds as its empire through the ministry
Of light, its elemental sole ally?
The Almighty Wisdom and Power that could direct,
And with a single element effect
So vast a purpose, shall we dare deny
(What reason teaches and analogy)
That the same Wisdom and Power, working his will
With the like simple means, with the same skill,
In a like form and method might devise
All that a grosser sense can recognize?
No! the celestial Author and Creator
In those two volumes of the Book of Nature
Ordained for our instruction, represents,
By multiform but single elements,
One universe of sense, all that we know,
The visible world of instantaneous show
And tangible creation, hard and slow,
The last remaining inlet of the mind,
The dreary blank creation of the blind.
Nor is it vain what elder bards indite
Of Love self-born, and by inherent might
Emerged from chaos and primeval night.
Was this the form, which idle fancy sings,
With glowing cheeks adorned and glittering wings,
The classic idol and the modern toy,
A torch, a quiver, and a blinded boy?
Was this the sense? or does it represent
Some sovereign and controlling element,
Some impulse unapproachable by thought,
Some force that 'midst the eternal tumult wrought,
And this fair order from confusion brought;
Established motion's substance, form, and weight,
The statutes of this earth's material state?
—Suppose a single element the source
Of all attractive and impelling force,
That motion and cohesion are the extreme
United opposites upon the beam
Of Nature's balance, a magnetic whole,
Single itself, and one; but pole to pole
Contrasted; as the powers of heat and light
Stand each confronted with its opposite
Darkness and cold; not mere negations they,
But negatives with a divided sway,
Pressing—oppressed—advancing—giving way.
Suppose then (as has been supposed before
By wisest men) that in the days of yore
There was a deeper knowledge, and a store
Of science more exalted and sublime,
Whose relics on the barren shore of time
Lie stranded and dispersed, retaining still
Intelligible marks of art and skill,
Of an intended purpose and appliance,
The scanty salvage of a shipwrecked science
Submerged time out of mind! Kepler could draw
From these remains the mighty truth he saw
Of an harmonic, necessary law;
Then with an indefatigable mind
Analogies incessantly combined
With a foreseen conclusion full in view
He worked the problem till he proved it true.
Is there no spirit of a nobler strain,
A Kepler or a Newton once again,
With light upon the chaos to divide,
And fix the mass of knowledge waste and wide;
For as “the crowd of trees conceals the wood,”
With all things known, with nothing understood,
Perplexed with new results from year to year,
As on the puzzled Ptolemaic sphere
With cycles epicycles scribbled o'er,
Like ancient Philomaths we doze and pore:
Thus Ashmole, Lilly, shine in portraiture
(Dear to the calcographic connoisseur);
While the wise nightcap and the Jacob's staff
Awe the beholder and conceal his laugh.
—If we despair then to decypher nature
With our new facts and novel nomenclature:
Those almanacks of science that appear
Framed and adjusted for the current year,
And warranted correct for months to come;
If calculation fails to find the sum
(A formula to comprehend the whole)
Of countless items on the crowded scroll,
Corrected, re-corrected, and replaced,
Obliterated, interlined, effaced,
Blotted and torn in philosophic squabble,
And endless, unintelligible scrabble;
If the huge labyrinth with its winding ways
Entangled in the inextricable maze,
The wilderness of waste experiment,
Has foiled your weary spirits worn and spent,
Since every path is trodden round and tried,
—Trust for a moment a superior guide;
The trembling needle or the stedfast star,
Some point of lofty mark and distant far,
These shall conduct you, whatsoe'er your fate,
At least in a decided path and strait;
Not running round in circles, evermore
Bewildered and bewitched as heretofore:
Like the poor clown that robbed the wizard's store
Breathless and hurrying in his endless race,
With eager action, and a ghastly face,
By subtle magic tether'd to the place.

Yet let us hope that something may befall!
That things will find their level after all!
That these atomic facts, ever at war,
Tumbled together in perpetual jar,
After a certain period more or less
Will ultimately form or coalesce.
So shall it be! Strife shall engender motion,
And kindle into life each tardy notion.
Keen disputants in a judicial fight,
Sparring with spurs of controversial spite,
In battle-royal shall decide the right.
Till truth's majestic image stands revealed
The sole surviving game-cock in the field!
—That venerable, old, reviewing phrase,
Threadbare and overworn—mark what it says
The fashionable tenet of the time,
Tho' stale in prose, it may be hashed in rhyme.
—When disputants, it says, with hasty zeal
Clash in hard discord like the flint and steel,
The sparks elided from their angry knocks,
Caught in a philosophic tinder-box,
Falling upon materials cut and dried,
With modest brimstone diligently ply'd,
And urged with puffs incessantly supplied,
As an atonement for the noise and scandal,
Will serve to light a scientific candle.
—But no!—the wrath of man never attains
To pure results, nor his ambitious pains,
Nor busy canvas, nor a learned league,
(Except in undermining and intrigue;)
In lonely shades those miracles of thought
Are brought to light. No miracles are wrought
To gratify the scruples or the whim
Of a contentious testy Sanhedrim.
“To satisfy just doubts,” “to guide decision,”
For no such purposes, the mighty vision
Was ever yet vouchsaf'd sudden and bright,
Descending in a soft illapse of light.
Quenching its murky steam of filthy vapour,
It kindles at a touch the fumy taper.

Let, then, a new progressive step be tried,
Since light and heat, it is not now denied,
Are agents, consubstantial and allied.
Now for this other power, which we must call
(Taking a single quality for all)
Attraction, or the power of gravity,
The power of motion, form, solidity,
Third person of the Pagan Trinity.
This power, then, of attraction, truly viewed,
Displays a likeness and similitude
With light, as a congenial kindred force;
For common reason will concede, of course,
That all attractive forces great and small
Are retroactive and reciprocal;
As when the mariners with trampling feet,
In even cadence round the capstan beat,
Moving in order round the mighty beam,
To warp their vessel against wind and stream,
While the huge cable, with its dripping fold,
In weary coils incessantly enrolled,
Drags forth the labouring vessel to the deep.
The point, then, we have conquer'd, and can keep:
As being drawn itself, the cable draws,
Tho' passive, it becomes a moving cause.
Take then at once the reason and the facts,
Light is attracted, therefore light attracts—
And though the nobler attributes of light
Have left this incident unnoticed quite,
And tho' we find its feebler efforts fail,
Of marked effect on a material scale,
Unheeded and impalpable to sense,
Yet reason must acknowledge its pretence
Enough to range it in a kindred class
Tho' inefficient on the subject mass.
The facts and inferences fairly viewed,
With this result we finally conclude—
If ever Reason justly gave assent
To truths too subtle for experiment,
Then light is an attracting element,
And heat, its congener, will be the same,
A joint supporter of this worldly frame.
Nor these alone—but that attractive force
Described in the first lines of our discourse,
Whose nature and existence known of yore
Was but a portion of the secret store
Of Eastern learning, which the busy Greek,
Active and eager, started forth to seek,
Purchasing here and there a wealthy prize,
Amidst the ruins of the rich and wise,
The mighty sacerdotal monarchies,
Stupendous Egypt—Stately Babylon
By the barbarian Persian overthrown.
(The Chivalrous Barbarian in his line,
A gallant loyal warrior, but in fine
A fierce Iconoclastic Ghibelline!)
Such is the fact—our first historic page
—Herodotus—begins with a dark age,
An age of antient Empires overturned,
Records obliterated, temples burned,
Their living archives, all the learned class,
Methodically murder'd in a mass.
Hence like a sutler at a city's sack,
The wary Grecian pedlar filled his pack,
And cannily contrived to bring it back
With merchandize: such as a pedlar gets,
Remnants and damaged samples, broken sets,
Fragments of plunder, purchased or purloined,
Rich fragments but incongruously joined.

The scheme of Hutchinson was incomplete,
It stands without its complement of feet:
A tripod resting upon light and heat
His third supporter fails, limping and bare
Of evidence, his element of air.
His scheme then at the time was doomed to fall,
Or left with lumber propt against the wall,
A maim'd utensil, destitute of use,
Obscure with dust of obsolete abuse—
The learned dust excited in the frays
Of Jacobite and Hanoverian days.
Newton and Cambridge and the Brunswick line,
And Dr. Clarke, and Gracious Caroline,
Matched against Oxford and the right divine.
Whether, in fact, as all opinions mix,
They finally converge to politics,
Or shrewd intriguers had contrived to fix
On their opponents a disloyal stain,
Blind to the glories of so bright a Reign,
The name with Jacobite opinions link't
With Jacobite opinions was extinct:
Each cultivated ornamental prig
Of hybrid form, a parson and a whig,
(A whig by principle or calculation,
A Christian Priest by trade and occupation)
Each smooth aspirant, loyal and correct,
Was bound in policy to shun the sect;
While of the sacred bench each righteous son,
Clayton and Hoadley, and meek Warburton,
Condemned them soul and body, blood and bone!
Meanwhile Sir Isaac's theory of attraction,
Afforded universal satisfaction;
Applauded by the clerical profession
As friendly to the Protestant succession;
A sober well-affected theory
Which none but a nonjuror could deny—
A theory may be false or incomplete,
While the phenomena and the rules may meet;
Conceive (as was imagined formerly)
That vision is ejected from the eye
—You'll find the rules of perspective apply.
We judge from practice the physician's skill,
And let him choose what principles he will,
Bad theories may cure and good ones kill.
First then our drugs and aliments we see,
Dry, cold, or hot in some assigned degree:
Next mathematic learning came in use,
The blood was clogged with particles obtuse:
Poisons were points which antidotes must sheath,
Mechanic action made us move and breathe:
A chemic system rose upon its fall,
Acids and alkalis were all in all:
A change of argument, a change of style,
Mere speculative change, for all the while
The same prescriptions rested on the file,
And while the verbal argument endured,
The patients as before were killed or cured.

A theory that enables us to plant
A tortoise underneath our elephant,
But wants a creature of some other sort,
To serve us for our tortoise's support:
In other words it teaches us the laws
—Of motion and attraction—not the cause.
The laws are undisputed, and we see
How punctually predicted facts agree;
Meanwhile the cause unnoticed or denied
Is with a monstrous postulate supplied:
First we suppose that our terrestrial ball,
Launched forth with an enormous capital
Of motion—like a wandering prodigal
Without a stipend of in-coming rent,
In all his course of travel, has not spent
One stiver of the first allotted sum,
Nor ever will, for ages yet to come.
The quantum still remains as heretofore,
An unexhausted, undiminished store,
The same precisely, neither less nor more;
An article of faith hard to digest,
If common sense and nature are the test,
Yet proselytes must bolt it, husk and bran,
And keep it on their stomachs if they can—
—No theory or conjecture, not a notion,
Of the first causes of a planet's motion!
Whence it originates no creature knows,
But with a given impulse forth it goes;
Attraction's laws prohibit it to roam,
And bind the wand'rer to his central home;
Else had the wretched orb been whirl'd away,
Far from the stars of night and beams of day,
A cheerless, endless, solitary way.
Rescued, and grateful for the glad reprieve,
It gilds the morn or decks the front of eve,
And winds a joyous uneccentric way
In the warm precincts of the solar ray:
Obedient system clears the bounds of space
From all that might retard the yearly race.
The same incessant circuit is pursued,
With the same force for ages unrenewed,
And sages of the sacred gown conclude.
That independent of an acting cause,
The properties of matters, motions, laws,
Preserve the punctual planet in his sphere,
Ordain the seasons and bring round the year—
See here the lessons reverend gownsmen teach,
The proud result of Learning's utmost reach.

Since wisest moderns have approved it true,
We take it as a fact—Nothing is new.
No—not the boast of this new century,
Our busy science of geology;
The terms of parturition and of birth
Express the first development of earth.
“This habitable earth, cheerful and fair,
“Heaved from the teeming depth to light and air;”
This truth which Hutton's school has taught us newly
Where do we find it first? In Moses truly!
You see the passage paraphrased and quoted,
In the two lines above with commas noted,
Much weaker than the original. Again—
The wisest, in his time, of living men
Adopts the same expression, adding more,
How the protruded mountains pierced the core
Of secondary strata formed before,
Even as a finger passing thro' “a ring,”
This truth was known to the “sapient king—”
See Proverbs, chapter eight, verse twenty-five,
And try what other meaning you can give;
Or take the converse; to characterise
The sense proposed, and frame it otherwise,
In Hebrew words, clearer and more precise;
And we shall hail you when the task is done
A better scholar than King Solomon—
—The Hetrurian priesthood knew the identity
Of lightning and of electricity.
Discovery or tradition!—Such things were
Sources of hidden knowledge, deep and rare,
Before the days of Franklin and Voltaire,
(In the good days of old idolatry,
And priestcraft! undisturbed by blasphemy)
—Or tell me! By what strange coincidence
Is the same word employed in the same sense,
A single word that serves to signify
The electric substance and the Deity
Of storms and lightning; (their Elician Jove)
Whom with due rites invoked from the dark clouds above,
The priest attracted downwards! woe betide
The novice that presumptuously tried,
Ignorant of the ritual and the form,
To dally with the Deity of the storm;
Like the rash Roman king, by the dread stroke,
Which his unpractised art dared to provoke,
Smitten and slain; a just example made
For ancient sovereigns who might dare to invade,
And tamper with the sacerdotal trade.

In the vast depths of ocean far below,
Where neither storms disturb nor currents flow,
Fish would remain unconscious of the water:
And reason, if experience had not taught her
By the rude impulse of the changeful wind,
Mere common understanding would not find,
That air existed—Nothing here below,
Unless it can be felt or make a show,
Is marked or heeded, nothing else we know.
If light were universally displayed
Without its opposites, darkness and shade,
Constant and uniform in operation,
It never would attract our observation.

Suppose the case, and that it were denied
That light existed—how could we decide,
Or judge the question by what test applied?
Strong Reason and superior Art perhaps,
Long labouring in a long continued lapse
Of ages, might at length attain to show
What infants from their first impression know:
—“Ever the same yesterday and to-day;”
Powers that exhibit no phenomena,
(No signs of life in change or difference)
To the mere understanding and the sense,
Are non-existencies; but here again,
Can our acknowledged principles explain
All our acknowledged facts? Do none remain?
When causes are assigned to their effects,
Will there be no Lacuna, no defects,
Nothing anomalous or unexplained?
I doubt it—otherwise the point is gained;
The point, I presuppose, that there exists
An unacknowledged power, that as it lists
Rules paramount in its domain of air,
Guiding its endless eddies here and there:
But whither or from whence the currents flow,
Their source or end our senses cannot show,
And science never has attained to know.

Darwin has sung in verse beyond compare,
That in the North, beneath the Frozen Bear,
A huge chamelion spits and swallows air.
In fact, an instantaneous formation,
And a precipitous annihilation
Of our aerial fluid seems implied
In facts not yet developed or denied.
As in a whirlpool's strife the waters flow,
Pressing in eager eddies as they go
Precipitously to the void below,
In their own giddy circle wheeled and held
By mutual haste impelling and impell'd:
With a like action airy currents move
To some unseen and hasty void above.
Now mark a strong coincidence!—Compare
The whirlpool's centre with its spire of air
Drawn downwards; and behold the waters move
From the smooth ocean's surface rear'd above
In fluid spires! Phenomena like these,
The careless seaman, in the summer seas,
Views unalarmed, the momentary play
Of nature's power, an innocent display.
But what a power is here! how little known,
That not beneath the Frozen north alone,
As Darwin deemed, but in the sultry zone
Exists and acts—an atmosphere destroyed,
And the creation of an instant void!
What other explanation can be found?
You see the watery columns whirling round,
They rise and move while Gravitation's laws
Are modified by a suspending clause—
In fine, if all our explanations fail,
When neither reason nor research avail
To solve the difficulty, this remains
The fair result and guerdon of our pains—
That ex absurdo thus it might be shown
That Gravity has phenomena of its own.
Thus far, at least, we might presume to say—
Here is a power without phenomena,
And the phenomena of a power unknown,
If both can be combined and brought in one
We gain a point, and something may be done.
The mere suggestion sure may be permitted:
No damage is incurred, no harm committed,
If not, they both remain on their own score
Obscure and unconnected as before.

Now then, resuming what before was stated,
We seek to show the converse: Air created,
And a continued efflux generated,
Where seamen witness in a cloudless sky
A driving hurricane eager and dry,
Continuous fury—without pause or shift
Its unappeasable, impetuous drift
Scourges and harasses the main for hours,
For days, for weeks, with unabated powers,
The Spirit of the Tempest hurries by,
With hideous impulse, and a piercing cry,
A persevering wild monotony.
Shorn of her topmast, all her goodly pride
And rich attire of canvas stript aside;
In a bare staysail, with an abject mien,
The vessel labours in the deep ravine,
A watery vale that intercepts the sight,
Or in an instant hurried to the height,
Pauses upon the fluid precipice,
Then downward to the dark and deep abyss
Shoots forth afresh, and with a plunging shock
Achieves the leap of her Tarpeian rock.
Her joints of massy frame compactly clenched
With the tormenting strain, are racked and wrenched;
The baffled mariners, forlorn and pale,
Beneath eternal buffet droop and fail.
—Yet strange it seems the while! no signs are given
Betokening hope or fear—no vapour driven
In quick career across the void of Heaven!
Tranquil and calm and blank, the mighty space
Wears an unconscious and unruffled face
Impassive in sublimity serene,
Mocking our toil, smiling upon the scene!
And yet the strong commotion was foretold,
(The sign Archilochus beheld of old)
The crooked, wicked cloud that, creeping slow
Around the distant mountain's haughty brow,
Folded its angry wreath, settled and fixed,
Coiled in itself, unmoving and unmixed,
—A talismanic atmospheric spell—
The wary seaman knew the signal well;
The seal of wrath: and from the token drew
A timely warning, terrible but true—
—Will the known principles of any school,
Will hydrostatic laws, or those which rule
The motions of elastic fluids guide
Our judgment, or assist us to decide
On facts like these? Alas! when all is said,
We seek a living power among the dead,
And struggle to draw water in a sieve.
The cause of such effects must act and live,
Subsisting as a separate element,
Not as a mere result and accident
A simple passive thing urged or controuled
By change of cold to heat, or heat to cold,
The vassal of a fickle temperature,
But a distinct and active power of nature.