SLEEPLESS HOURS.

Dominion, Volume 7, Issue 1650, 6 January 1914, Page 8

SLEEPLESS HOURS.

A SCIENTIST'S TROUBLE.

Dr. Alfred RusScl Wallace, the great scientist whose death was recardW recently, a little while ago wroto to Solomon Eagle, of the ''Now Statesman,"' saying:—

"Your article maße sme think that you aro well acquainted with our early poets, and can tell me—what I have, wished to learn for 70 years—the writers of the enclosed two short poems on Love, which have been in my memory since my early youth, but which I have never been able to find in any books I possess or have access to. To me they seem perfect gems of thought and ox'pression, and if you have never met with them perhaps you will print them in your next article in order to discover if any of your readers can solve the problem of their authorship. They seem to me to have tho 'ring' of the best Elizabethan rwets. "I think I have quoted them correctly, as they form a portion of the small stock of my favourite verses with which I beguile my many sleepless hours." "The first, called 'Two Kinds of Love,' was by Moors. ■ ■ ■'.■

"To sigh, yet feel no pain, To weep, .vet scarce know why, - To toy an hour with beauty's chain, Then throw it idly by; To kneel at every shrine , . ■ - Then give the heart to none; ■ '. ■, To feel all other charms dirhib s-V But those we just' have won; .'■"■:■ This is love—faithless love— .. '■ ■, Such as kindleth hearts that rcre. •To keep ono 6acrcd flame Through lifo unchanged, unmoved, To love in wintry ago the same '.. .... : As lirst in youth wo loved: To feel that we adore . . . With such refined excess That though the heart would break with more ' It could not love with less; This is love—faithful love — Such as Saints might feel above! : ■ "Tho other poem is an octette, beginning 'Love-1 I will tell won what it is to love,' and is by C. Swain. "Wallace's experience dilfcrod from that of Darwin, who complained in later life that the sense of beauty in poetry, which ho had possessed as a young man, had been entirely destroyed by his scientific occupations," says Solomon Eagle. "Huxley, on tho other hand, when not demonstrating the origin. of the vertebrate, skull or tho improbability of Jehovah, wrote poems himself. t Some of them are included in the new volume of his wife's yerse; they are irreproachable in sentiment, but in expression they aro what one would, expect t'roai an Archbishop's wife. However far they are from tho 'Ode to a Grecian Urn,' they do attest the presence of the almost universal impulse to'pony one' 6 feelings into a metrical vessel.

:,Sir Oliver Lodge pay.?, in the "Clarion": —

"It seems to nip that Wallace's noble, ,sinipio life and .high standard o< fcspntifio honour arc among his best legacies to humanity."