While partaking of nitrous oxide with acquaintances, he extolled the glories of science: “I dream of Science restoring to Nature what Luxury, what Civilization have stolen from her-pure hearts, the forms of angels, bosoms beautiful, and panting with Joy & Hope.” Davy may have had a brilliant scientist’s brain, but he had the heart and soul of a poet. One of his poems celebrated “science, whose delicious water flows / From Nature’s bosom.” Davy’s enthusiasm led to risky, self-destructive behavior-he often inhaled strange chemical gases as experiments, a practice that nearly killed him. Early on, Davy wrote poetry, and later became friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Holmes also looks at the British chemist Humphry Davy, who, among other accomplishments, discovered that chlorine and iodine were elements. He even compared his skill at seeing astronomical phenomena with the skill required to play Handel’s fugues. That led to an interest in mathematics and then astronomy, which he pursued with the same emotional fervor as any classical music piece. Astronomer William Herschel, who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, started his career as a musician.
The author focuses primarily on the lives of two men who straddled both worlds, who embraced “Romantic science” and pursued it with the passion of poets or painters. However, British historian Holmes ( Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer, 2000, etc.) writes, the divide between scientific endeavors and artistic pursuits was not always so clearly delineated. Romanticism, the deeply emotional artistic movement of the second half of the 18th century, was partly a reaction against the pragmatism of Enlightenment scientists. Energetic analysis of the “Romantic Age of Science.”
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