There must be something
quieting and ennobling in this steady contemplation of vast
machineries, which have all the force and terror of human passions,
and yet the serene steadiness and certainty of unchanging law. It is
"a purer ether, a diviner air," from whence its citizens can afford to
look down in peace, perhaps in scorn, upon the ignoble strifes beneath
them.
I suppose, too, that other men can hardly dream of the one vast
pleasure which comes to these searchers when ever so little a new
truth or a fresh analogy reaches them as the result of their work. The
pursuit itself is all absorbing, all exacting, and when at last the
purpose is attained, and out of darkness flashes the light of some
novel law, the knowledge of some new connecting link, some simple
explanation of a range of facts or phenomena, or even the discovery of
a fresh analogy or homology, or of an undescribed fossil being, the
purity of the pleasure which they win is something which to be
understood must have been felt. "I think," said Jeffries Wyman once to
the writer, "that the most happy and heartfilling thing in the world
is to come face to face with something which no one but God ever saw
before." How transcendent must have been this form of joy when it
rewarded the first who saw the spectrum analysis of starlight in its
fullness of meaning, or to him who first knew where and how the blood
runs its wonderful courses!
Then, too, the life of other men, of the merchant and the lawyer,
palls as age advances and its rewards are paid in dollars or in honor.
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