The foundation of this ascent is natural history. There must be nothing omitted here, or the stairs would be unsafe. The rule in this School, as stated by the Interpreter in Chief, is, 'that there be _nothing in the globe of matter_, which should not be likewise in the globe of _crystal_ or _form_;' that is, he explains, 'that there should not be anything in _being_ and _action_, which should not be _drawn_ and _collected_ into _contemplation_ and _doctrine_.' The lowness of matter, all the capabilities and actualities of speech and action, not of the refined only, but of the vulgar and profane, are included in the science which contemplates an historical result, and which proposes the _reform_ of these actualities, the cure of these maladies,--which comprehends man as man in its intention,--which makes the _Common Weal_ its end.
Science is the word that unlocks the books of this School, its gravest and its lightest, its books of loquacious prose and stately allegory, and its Book of Sports and Riddles. Science is the clue that still threads them, that never breaks, in all their departures from the decorums of literature, in their lowest descents from the refinements of society. The vulgarity is not _the_ vulgarity of the vulgar--the inelegancy is not the spontaneous rudeness of the ill-bred--any more than its doctrine of nature is the doctrine of the unlearned. The loftiest refinements of letters, the courtliest breeding, the most exquisite conventionalities, the most regal dignities of nature, are always present in _these_ works, to measure these abysses, flowering to their brink. Man as he is, booked, surveyed,--surveyed from the continent of nature, put down as he is in her book of kinds, not as he is from his own interior isolated conceptions only,--the universal powers and causes as they are developed in him, in his untaught affections, in his utmost sensuous darkness,--the universal principle instanced whereit is most buried, the cause in nature found;--man as he is, in his heights and in his depths, 'from his lowest note to the top of his key,'--man in his possibilities, in his actualities, in his thought, in his speech, in his book language, and in his every-day words, in his loftiest lyric tongue, in his lowest pit of play-house degradation, searched out, explained, interpreted. That is the key to the books of this Academe, who carry always on their armour, visible to those who have learned their secret, but hid under the symbol of their double worship, the device of the Hunters,--the symbol of the twin-gods,--the silver bow, or the bow that finds all. 'Seeing that she beareth two persons ... I do also otherwise _shadow_ her.'
