Читать книгу My Commonplace Book онлайн

115 страница из 124

Some sheathed

Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides

Immensity of sweetness.

Coleridge has a similar illustration, “Quarrels of anger ending in tears are favourable to love in its spring tide, as plants are found to grow very rapidly after a thunderstorm with rain”—(Allsop’s Letters, etc., of Coleridge). Coleridge died in 1834, and “The Ring and the Book” was published in 1868-9: it is curious that both poets should have been impressed with a fact that appears to have been only recently recognized. In the seventies Lemström proved that plants thrive under electricity; but I think it is only a few years ago that in some agricultural experiments in Germany it was found that electricity was of no benefit to the crops without rain or other moisture.

The quotation is from the fine judgment which the Pope delivers.

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.