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.
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