The River Falls journal. (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1857-1861, 1857-09-09


Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
SHAKESPEARE.
A passion for these two things is sup
posed to be incompatible. 1t is certainly
not; and the supposition is founded on
an ignorance of the nature of the human
mind, and the very sympathies of the two
strangers. Mathematical truth is not the
only truth in the world. An unpoetical
locican is not the only philosopher
Locke had no taste for fiction; he thought
Blackmore rs great a genius as Homer;
but this WAS conclusion he could never
have come to, ifhe had known his premis-
es. Newton considered poetry as on
par with "ingeneous nonsense" which
was an error as great as if he had ranked
himself with Tom D'Urfey, or made the
apex of triangle equal to the base of j..
Newton has had good for evil returned
him by "a greater than himself; for the
eye of imagination sees father than the
glasses of astronomy. | should say that
tho poets had praised their scorner too
much, illustrious as he is, if it were not
delightful to see that there is at least one
faculty in the world which knows how to
do Justice to all the rest. Of all the uni
versal privileges of poetry, this one is the
most peculiar, and marks her for what
she ia The mathematician, the school
! man, the wit, the statesman, and the sol
! der, may be blind to the merits of poetry,
and one another; but the poet by the
privilege which hepossesses ofrecognizing
every species of truth, is aware of the mer-
its Of mathematics, of learning, of wit, of
politics, and of generalship. He is great
in his own art, and he is great in his APP
probation of that of others. And this is
most remarkable in proportion as he is
poetical poet - a high lover of felton,
| Milton brought the visible and invisible
together 'son the top of Fiesole, " to pay
homage to Calico: and the Tuscan de-
served it, for he had an insight into the
world of imagination. cannot but fancy
! the shade of Newton blushing to reflect
that, among the many things which
he protested to know not, poetry was
omitted, of which he knew nothing
Great as he was, he indeed saw nothing
in the face of nature but its lines and col
ors not the lines and colors of passion and
sentiment included, but only squares and
their distances. and the anatomy of the
rainbow. He thought the earth glo-
rious planet: he knew it better than any
one else, in its connection with other plan
cts; and yet half the beauty of them all,
that which sympathy bestows and mag
/ nation colors, was to him blank. He
took space to be tho sensorium of the Del
ty, (s1 noble fancy could be struck out
of the involuntary encounter between his
intense sense of a mystery and the mag
nation he despised !! and yet this very
fancy was but an escape from the horror
of vacuum, and substitution of the
mere consciousness of existence for the
thoughts and images with which poet
would have accompanied it. He imagin-
ed the form of the house, and the pres
ence of the builder; but the life and the
variety, the paintings, the imagery, and
| the music-the loves and the joys, the
whole riches in the distance, the creations
heaped upon creation, and the particular
as well as aggregate consciousness of all
this in the great mind Of whose presence
he was conscious-to this his want of i'm
apination rendered him insensible. Tho
| Fairy Queen was to him trifie; the
dreams of Shakespeare ingenious non
sense" But courts were something, and
SO were the fashions there. When the
name of the Deity was mentioned, he
| took off bis hat!
There are two worlds; the world that
! we can measure with line and rule, and
the world that we feel with our hearts and
!, ,aeinations. To besensible Of the truth
n ~ oaa,,, ne Of these, is to know truth but
b,- halves M,,..nn said, that he "dared
be- known to think Spsnser better teach
or that Scotus or Aquinas;" he did not
say than Plato or P ythagoras, who under
stood the two spheres within our reach.
Both of these, and Milton himself, were as
great lovers Of physical and political truth
as any men; but they knew that it was
not all; they felt much beyond, and they
made experiments upon more. 1t Is
doubted by the critics, whether Chaucer's
delight in the handling Of fictions, or in
the detection and scrunity Of piece OF
truth, was the greater. Chaucer was =
conscientious Reformer, which is man
| who has passion for truth; and 80 was