Publisher's Synopsis
in many a sequestered nook, where the beauty of the scene gave to the soul its grandest appreciation of nature's handiwork; but the poet's song and the painter's canvas are too often the false airs and the tinsel drapery of Momus-fun and folly. But poets and painters live in a realm uncongenial to the startling facts of modern chemistry. Virgil would undoubtedly have been as ready to have believed that H₂O represented a glass of milk, as that it was the equivalent of pure water; while, if Raphael had been told that the pool of Bethesda was abundant with "albuminoid ammonia," he might innocently have believed it to be "something good to eat."
