“What is man?” I ask, and Science laughs and answers, “Electrons.” That is its latest guess. But does man look like them? Does he feel like them? Does he behave like them? Does he believe like them? In the laboratory he may. But out here in the hills of Hingham, where I am returned to the earth and the sky and to my own soul, I know that I AM, and that I still hold to all of those first things which Science would shame me out of, offering me electrons instead! I accept the electrons. Capering little deities, they are the sons of God. But so are you and I the sons of God--and we are electrons, trillions of electrons, if you like. Gods and atoms, we can dwell and think and feel as either, the two realms distinct and far apart, the roads between in a continual state of construction, dangerous but passable. The anatomist, laying down his scalpel, cries, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. I am fearfully and wonderfully made!”--his science passing into poetry, and from poetry to religion, but not easily in our present frame and mood. Science clears the sight and widens its range; but Science can never clear up the shadows at the bottom of a woodchuck. Only vision can do that, and Science lacks vision, using a microtome instead, paring its woodchuck till he is thinner than sliced sunlight before it can see through so much as a single stained cell of him. Science turns aside from shadows, walking by sight or else standing still. It deals with the flesh, not the spirit; and is as impotent in literature and art as in life and society. The potent thing among men and nations is love. Love never faileth. Yet never were we so afraid of love as we are to-day; and never did art and literature seem so fearful of the imagination, of vision, of the eternal, the divine. “Go get me a bird,” the old scientist said to me; “I will give you a lesson in skinning and mounting.” I was a young boy. Hurrying out to the woods, I was soon back with a cuckoo. The face of the old scientist darkened. “You should not have killed this bird, it is the friend of man. See when I open this gizzard.” And with a dexterous twist of his fingers turned inside out the gizzard, and showed it, like a piece of plush, its fleshy walls penetrated with millions of caterpillar hairs. To this day I feel the wonder of that knowledge, and I thrill at the meaning of that bird’s gizzard. Here was science and charity and poetry and religion. What untold good to man! What greater possible good to man? That was before I knew or understood the cuckoo’s song. And neither the old scientist, nor yet his book, “Sixteen Weeks in Zoölogy,” dealt with the song. Science is sure and beautiful with a gizzard. Poetry is sure and beautiful with both gizzard and song. And I wonder if the grinding gizzard or the singing throat is the better part of the cuckoo, even in this world of worms? “Though babbling only to the vale, Of sunshine and of flowers, Thou bringest unto me a tale Of visionary hours.