In many
dark old tomes, she met with chapters full of romance and poetry. They
were the works of the philosophers of the middle ages, such as
Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar
who created the prophetic Brazen Head. All these antique naturalists
stood in advance of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of
their credulity, and therefore were believed, and perhaps imagined
themselves, to have acquired from the investigation of nature a
power above nature, and from physics a sway over the spiritual
world. Hardly less curious and imaginative were the early volumes of
the Transactions of the Royal Society, in which the members, knowing
little of the limits of natural possibility, were continually
recording wonders, or proposing methods whereby wonders might be
wrought.
But, to Georgiana, the most engrossing volume was a large folio
from her husband's own hand, in which he had recorded every experiment
of his scientific career, with its original aim, the methods adopted
for its development, and its final success or failure, with the
circumstances to which either event was attributable. The book, in
truth, was both the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious,
imaginative, yet practical and laborious, life. He handled physical
details, as if there were nothing beyond them; yet spiritualized
them all, and redeemed himself from materialism, by his strong and
eager aspiration towards the infinite.
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