Davy had an intense love of Nature, and nothing stirred the poetic fire within him more than the sight of some sublime natural object such as a storm-beaten cliff, a mighty mountain, a resistless torrent, or some spectacle which recalled the power and majesty of the sea. Not that he was insensible to the simpler charms of pastoral beauty, or incapable of sympathy with Nature in her softest, tenderest moods. But these things never seemed to move him as did some scene of grandeur, or some manifestation of stupendous natural energy. The following lines, written on Fair Head during the summer of 1806, may serve as an example of how scenery when associated in his mind with the sentiments of dignity or strength affected him:-- “Majestic Cliff! Thou birth of unknown time, Long had the billows beat thee, long the waves Rush’d o’er thy hollow’d rocks, ere life adorn’d Thy broken surface, ere the yellow moss Had tinted thee, or the wild dews of heaven Clothed thee with verdure, or the eagles made Thy caves their aëry. So in after time Long shalt thou rest unalter’d mid the wreck Of all the mightiness of human works; For not the lightning, nor the whirlwind’s force, Nor all the waves of ocean, shall prevail Against thy giant strength, and thou shalt stand Till the Almighty voice which bade thee rise Shall bid thee fall.” In spite of a love-passage which seems to have provoked a succession of sonnets, his devotions to Calliope were by no means so unremitting as to prevent him from following the plan of study he had marked out for himself. His note-books show that in the early part of 1796 he attacked the mathematics, and with such ardour that in little more than a year he had worked through a course of what he called “Mathematical Rudiments,” in which he included “fractions, vulgar and decimal; extraction of roots; algebra (as far as quadratic equations); Euclid’s elements of geometry; trigonometry; logarithms; sines and tangents; tables; application of algebra to geometry, etc.” In 1797 he began the study of natural philosophy, and towards the end of this year, when he was close on nineteen, he turned his attention to chemistry, merely, however, at the outset as a branch of his professional education, and with no other idea than to acquaint himself with its general principles. His good fortune led him to select Lavoisier’s “Elements”--probably Kerr’s translation, published in 1796--as his text-book. No choice could have been happier. The book is well suited to a mind like Davy’s, and he could not fail to be impressed by the boldness and comprehensiveness of its theory, its admirable logic, and the clearness and precision of its statements.