It is further evident that Southey had the highest possible opinion of Davy's talents, for he wrote thus to Taylor: 'Davy is proceeding in his chemical career with the same giant strides as at his outset. His book upon the nitrous oxyd will form an epoch in the science. I never witnessed such indefatigable activity in any other man, nor ardour so regulated by cool judgment.' In fact our poet-chemist must have been altogether a most fascinating man. An old personal acquaintance of his writes in the 'Gentleman's Magazine,' 1845, that 'when Davy is at ease, and excited in conversation, his splendid eyes irradiate his whole countenance, and he looks almost inspired.' But perhaps the best analysis of Davy's powers is that given in _Good Words_ for 1879, by Professor Ferguson, who has also written by far the most generally interesting account of the great chemist's discoveries: 'Davy's mind,' he says, 'presents so many characteristics, that one cannot help thinking of it when perusing the narrative of his life and discoveries. It is that of the highest type of experimentalists. There is never any straining after either facts or laws. If there was a practical problem to solve, there was an instinctive perception required of the means to be employed. He asked his questions; Nature replied gently, kindly. How could she keep silent when the being she had made to learn from her inquired? There was never anything superfluous, for he always saw the aim of the replies no less than of the questions, and knew what to do next. 'Was it a question in science? the same instinct guided him to the means. The intensest perception of real analogies led either to the discovery of new bodies, and to the unravelling of obscure and perplexed phenomena, or to the enunciation of views of general action, which are only now adopted in all their extent and recognised as true. It was thus that he declared against the oxygen theory of acids--that he was never a devoted convert to Dalton's atomic views--and that he was so thoroughly a dynamician in a science which is still almost entirely statical. The laboratory, rather than the study, was the scene of his triumphs; it was there where his strength lay. No phenomenon was too minute to escape him; no consequence too improbable not to be brought into connection with the premises; no law too wide to be grasped in its known entirety. In all his work, in all his thinking, there is a magnificence, an ever-burning light which makes us lift up the head and gaze with purified vision upon the world, and a wild freshness, a provocative thought which, while we recur to it again and again, and are never sent away empty, are no less proofs of this man's vivid and enduring individuality.'