In the world of knowledge the pursuit of truth is romantic. The scientific inquirer lives in a realm of strangeness and in the presence of the unknown, in a place so haunted with profound feeling, so electric with the emotions that feed great minds, that whether awe of the unsolved or of the solved be the stronger sentiment he cannot tell; and the appeal made to him--to the explorer in every bodily peril, to the experimenter in the den of untamed forces, to the thinker in his solitude--is often a romantic appeal. The moments of great discoveries are romantic moments, as is seen in Keats's sonnet, lifting Cortez and the star-gazer on equal heights with the reader of the Iliad. The epic of science is a Columbiad without end. Nor is this less true of those branches of knowledge esteemed most dry and prosaic. Locke, Adam Smith, Darwin were all similarly placed with Pythagoras, Aristotle and Copernicus; the mind, society and nature, severally, were their Americas. Even in this age of the mechanical application of forces, which by virtue of the large part of these inventions in daily and world-wide life seems superficially, and is called, a materialistic age, romanticism is paramount and will finally be seen so. Are not these things in our time what Drake and Spanish gold and Virginia, what Clive and the Indies, were to other centuries? It is true that the element of commercial gain blends with other phases of our inventions, and seems a debasement, an avarice; but so it was in all ages. Nor are the applications of scientific discovery for the material ends of wealth other or relatively greater now than the applications of geographical discovery, for example, to the same ends were in Elizabeth's reign and later. In the first ages commercial gain was in league with the waves from which rose the Odyssey,--a part of that early trading, coasting world, as it was always a part of the artistic world of Athens. Gain in any of its material forms, whether wealth, power or rank, does not debase the knowledge, the courage of heart, the skill of hand and brain, from which it flows, for it is their natural and proper fruit; nor does it by itself materialize either the man or the nation, else civilization were doomed from the start, and the pursuit of truth would end in humiliation and ignominy. It is rather the attitude of mind toward this new world of knowledge and this spectacle of man now imperializing through nature's forces, as formerly through discovery of the earth's lands and seas, that makes the character of our age. Romanticism, being the enveloping mood in whose atmosphere the spirit of man beholds life, and, as it were, the light on things, changes its aspect in the process of the ages with the emergence of each new world of man's era; and as it once inhered in English loyalty and the piety of Christ's sepulchre, and in English voyaging over-seas and colonizing of the lands, it now inheres in the conquest of natural force for the arts of peace. The