my eyes with sparkling luster filled"), but who got an even greater high from what he called the "sacred stream of science." The most prolific of the poetizing scientists was Davy, whose verse heated up when he described his experiments with nitrous oxide ("my cheek with rosy blushes warm.
Holmes's book brackets a period in European history when poets engaged with science, and when scientists wrote poetry.Ġ:00 / 2:47 Space tourism's delayed take offĪmong the former were Keats, Shelley, Byron, and especially the opium addict Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who argued about evolution and coined the word "psychosomatic." (He also scored cannabis from the botanically adept Joseph Banks.) During the Romantic Era, Banks and his many protégés practiced a science like none known before, deconstructing the universe for the sheer thrill of discovery.Īstronomer William Herschel, chemist Humphry Davy, the doomed explorer Mungo Park, the ballooning Montgolfier brothers, and all the other members of Holmes's cast were infused with the ardent passions of the age every bit as fully as their more widely remembered literary counterparts.īack then, the men of science and the men of literature were united in common cause.
He was handsome, wealthy, and brilliant, and he financed scientific inquiry first as an individual, then for four decades as the president of the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. It was a singular time, and this is a singular book.īoth book and era are set in motion by Banks. Bark Endeavour, first clapped eyes on the island of Tahiti." The opening words of Richard Holmes's "The Age of Wonder" couldn't be calmer, but the charge embedded within them ignited an era that merits his soaring title. (Fortune Magazine) - "On 13 April 1769, young Joseph Banks, official botanist to H.M.
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