SIR OLIVER LODGE'S SIMILE.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
Six,—Your correspondent Mr. Warrick suggests in last week's Spectator that Sir Oliver Lodge's simile may have been anticipated by earlier writers than Dr. James Hamilton, whose words he quotes. I think William Cowper expressed the same thought. To profess an acquaintance with Cowper is to confess oneself "early Victorian "; but if any of your readers will awake his volumes from their long and profound slumbers they will find in the " Winter's Morning Walk," Book V., lines 779-99, the passage I refer to. The indiffer- ence of the brute creation to beauties around is there used as a type of the blindness of the "natural man" to the things which are "spiritually discerned."—I am, Sir, &c.,
S. L. P.
"Acquaint thyself with God if thou wouldst taste His works. Admitted once to His embrace Thou shalt perceive that thou wast blind before : Thine eye shall be instructed ; and thine heart Made pure shall relish with divine delight Till then unfelt, what hands divine have wrought. Brutes graze the mountain-top with faces prone And eyes intent upon the scanty herb It yields them ; or recumbent on its brow, Ruminate heedless of the scene outspread Beneath, beyond, and stretching far away From inland regions to the distant main. Man views it and admires, but rests content With what ho views. The landscape has his praise But not its Author; unconcerned who form'd The Paradise he sees, he finds it such, And such, well pleased to find it asks no more. Not so the mind that has been touch'd from Heaven And in the school of sacred wisdom taught To read His wonders, in Whose thought the World wan' • as it is existed ere it was."
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