protracting life and healing sickness from the very blossoms of death. And there is chemistry, most poetical save astronomy of all the sciences, seeking to spiritualise the material--to hunt the atom to the point where it trembles over the gulf of nonentity--to weigh gases in scales, and the elements in a balance, and, in its more transcendental and daring shape, trying to interchange one kind of metal with another, and all kinds of forms with all, as in a music-led and mystic dance. Hence we find that such men as Beddoes, the author of the "Bride's Tragedy," have turned away from poetry to physiology, and found in it a grander if also ghastlier stimulus to their imaginative faculty. Hence Crabbe delighted to load himself with grasses and duckweed, and Goethe to fill his carriage with every variety of plant and mountain flower. Hence Davy, and the late lamented Samuel Brown, analysed, in the spirit of poets as well as of philosophers, and gave to the crucible what it had long lost, something of the air of a weird cauldron, bubbling over with magical foam, and shining, not so much in the severe light of science as in the "Light that never was on sea or shore. The consecration and the poet's dream." And hence, in the then state of Church matters, and of his own effervescent soul, Akenside felt probably in medicine a deeper charm than in theology, and imagined that it opened up a more congenial field for his powers both of reason and of imagination. In December 1740, Akenside was elected a member of the Edinburgh Medical Society. This society held meetings for discussion, and in them our poet set himself to shine as a speaker. His ambition, it is said, at this time, was to be a member of Parliament; and Dr. Robertson, then a student in the University, used to attend the meetings of the society chiefly to hear the speeches of the young and fiery Southron. Indeed, the rhetoric of the "Pleasures of Imagination" is finer than its poetry; and none but an orator could have painted Brutus rising "refulgent from the stroke" which slew Caesar, when he "Call'd on Tully's name, And bade the father of his country hail!" Englishmen are naturally more eloquent than the Scotch; and once and again has the Mark Akenside, the Joseph Gerald, or the George Thompson overpowered and captivated even the sober and critical children of the Modern Athens. While electrifying the Medical Society, Akenside did not neglect, if he did not eminently excel in his professional studies; and he continued to write sonorous verse, some specimens of which, including an "Ode on the Winter Solstice," and "Love, an Elegy," he is said to have printed for private distribution.