Not so with the largest, most sovereign minds of Science. Lesser men of dry or narrow minds may be so entangled in the meshes of their own understanding as never to escape from them, or may find more delight in the cleverness of their own explanations than in the wonderful things which they explain. But the larger minds, when they have done their work, emerge in time from the study and the laboratory, and look abroad with expanded vision and profounder reverence on that Universe, some small part only of which it has been given them to understand. Kepler, after he had discovered so far the laws of planetary motion, said that all that he had been able to do was to read a few of the thoughts of God. A short time before his death, Newton is reported to have said, and I give the oft-told story in the authentic words, “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”[6] A lesson surely to all future investigators, and, as his latest biographer has said, “to those especially who have never even found the smoother pebble or the prettier shell.” These great men, so feeling, are in the attitude of philosophic wonder—wonder both at part of the ways of God which it has been given them to see, and at that vaster part which they feel to lie beyond their vision. These laws which they have discovered, what are they? whence come they? They know that they themselves did not make them, only attained to catch sight of them. They know too that the laws did not make themselves. They are beautiful in themselves and in their benign operation; they are wonderful in their origin and continuance. This is what those great discoverers felt. And when they stood on the utmost verge of their scientific knowledge, and looked from what they had been allowed to see out upon the great beyond, they were rapt into that mood of wonder, akin to awe, which is the very essence of Poetry. Had they, in addition to their great scientific insight, been endowed with the gift of poetic utterance to express the wonder which they felt, they might have left to the world a poem of scientific truth transfigured by the imagination, such as has never yet been uttered.