tale;
And as at eve, by Fancy woo'd,
Amid the dark'ning aisles I stood;
O'er crumbling stone and grassy mound,
I saw the White Rose blooming round!
Death's flower, methought, fit emblem made
To dwell in Ruin's silent shade!
And may the youth--I breathed a prayer--
Have owned the Saviour's pardoning care,
Who, deaf to warnings from the sky,
Tinged the White Rose with murder's dye!

GREEK FIRE AND GUNPOWDER.[73]

The traditional account of inventions and discoveries whose origin is
involved in the darkness of antiquity is generally short and summary. To
some fortunate individual, whose name, either from his having actually
taken the most prominent part in the progress of the discovery, or, as
is more generally the case, having with the greatest and most
persevering energy impressed it upon the public, the whole merit is
ascribed and the whole glory attached.

The world, active though its individual members be, as to their own
specialties, is inert as a mass, and glad to save itself the trouble of
entering into details by adopting the hypothesis which has been most
urgently forced upon its notice, or which has caught its attention at
one of its most wakeful periods. We thus find nearly every discovery
which has added to the permanent stock of human knowledge attributed to
a single individual, and to a single guess of that individual.

The traditional account of so recent a discovery as that of Galvani, is
the preparation of frog soup for his wife, and the accidental touching
one of them with the knife; while, in fact, he had been for years
employed in examining the convulsive action of frogs, and had presented
several memoirs to the Institute of Bologna on the subject, before its
general publicity; indeed, in the main fact he had been anticipated by
Swammerdam, and he possibly by others.

Schwartz, the monk of Cologne, probably had a real existence, probably
had something to do with the progress of pyrotechnic art; it is even
more probable that he invented gunpowder than that the public invented
him. The very accident which is reported to have happened, it is not
altogether improbable did happen; but if a mixture of saltpetre,
sulphur, and charcoal accidentally exploded, it was not accident which
brought together those particular three ingredients out of the whole
laboratory of nature and art.

It is indeed possible that the frequency of accidental explosions when
gunpowder was known