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.
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