With A Bending Sail We Glided Rapidly By Tyngsborough And
Chelmsford, Each Holding In One Hand Half Of A Tart
Country
apple-pie which we had purchased to celebrate our return, and in
the other a fragment of the newspaper
In which it was wrapped,
devouring these with divided relish, and learning the news which
had transpired since we sailed. The river here opened into a
broad and straight reach of great length, which we bounded
merrily over before a smacking breeze, with a devil-may-care look
in our faces, and our boat a white bone in its mouth, and a speed
which greatly astonished some scow boatmen whom we met. The wind
in the horizon rolled like a flood over valley and plain, and
every tree bent to the blast, and the mountains like school-boys
turned their cheeks to it. They were great and current motions,
the flowing sail, the running stream, the waving tree, the roving
wind. The north-wind stepped readily into the harness which we
had provided, and pulled us along with good will. Sometimes we
sailed as gently and steadily as the clouds overhead, watching
the receding shores and the motions of our sail; the play of its
pulse so like our own lives, so thin and yet so full of life, so
noiseless when it labored hardest, so noisy and impatient when
least effective; now bending to some generous impulse of the
breeze, and then fluttering and flapping with a kind of human
suspense. It was the scale on which the varying temperature of
distant atmospheres was graduated, and it was some attraction for
us that the breeze it played with had been out of doors so long.
Thus we sailed, not being able to fly, but as next best, making a
long furrow in the fields of the Merrimack toward our home, with
our wings spread, but never lifting our heel from the watery
trench; gracefully ploughing homeward with our brisk and willing
team, wind and stream, pulling together, the former yet a wild
steer, yoked to his more sedate fellow. It was very near flying,
as when the duck rushes through the water with an impulse of her
wings, throwing the spray about her, before she can rise. How we
had stuck fast if drawn up but a few feet on the shore!
When we reached the great bend just above Middlesex, where the
river runs east thirty-five miles to the sea, we at length lost
the aid of this propitious wind, though we contrived to make one
long and judicious tack carry us nearly to the locks of the
canal. We were here locked through at noon by our old friend,
the lover of the higher mathematics, who seemed glad to see us
safe back again through so many locks; but we did not stop to
consider any of his problems, though we could cheerfully have
spent a whole autumn in this way another time, and never have
asked what his religion was. It is so rare to meet with a man
out-doors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is
independent of the labor of his hands. Behind every man's
busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and
industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is
always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going
on which will finally raise it above the surface.
The eye which can appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of a
scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by
a moral one. Few detect the morality in the former, or the
science in the latter. Aristotle defined art to be , _The principle of the work without the
wood_; but most men prefer to have some of the wood along with
the principle; they demand that the truth be clothed in flesh and
blood and the warm colors of life. They prefer the partial
statement because it fits and measures them and their commodities
best. But science still exists everywhere as the sealer of
weights and measures at least.
We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very
little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion
of their poetic value than we. The most distinct and beautiful
statement of any truth must take at last the mathematical form.
We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of
arithmetic, that one formula would express them both. All the
moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for
often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of the words
by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal
instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already
_supernatural_ philosophy. The whole body of what is now called
moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract
science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature
are the purest morality. The Tree of Knowledge is a Tree of
Knowledge of good and evil. He is not a true man of science who
does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn
something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish
to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and
extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle
exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than
the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with
physics but with ethics, _that_ is _mixed_ mathematics. The fact
which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The
purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and
elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral
life of its devotee, and he professes another religion than it
teaches, and worships at a foreign shrine. Anciently the faith
of a philosopher was identical with his system, or, in other
words, his view of the universe.
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