The Reflections show Robert Boyle as he lived and thought and felt; as he rose early on a “fair morning,” and looked up at the “variously coloured clouds,” and listened to the lark’s song overhead; as he picked up a horse-shoe, watched boys at their games, or tried a prismatical or triangular glass; as he fished with a “counterfeit fly” along the river-banks, or let the fish run away with the more homely bait; as he looked at his own shadow cast in the face of a pool, or his own face in a looking-glass with a rich frame. What an opportunity was the magnetical needle of a sundial, or the use of a burning-glass, or the drinking of water out of the brims of one’s own hat! What food for reflection was a syrup made of violets, or a glow-worm included in a crystal viol! What thoughts fluttered about the tail of a paper kite flown on a windy day, or about a lanthorn and candle carried by on a dark and windy night! And Robert Boyle did once shoot something, as may be seen from the title of one particular Reflection:
“Killing a Crow (out of a window) in a Hog’s trough, and immediately tracing the ensuing Reflection with a Pen made of one of his Quills....”
Very early in his life there was, alas! the least touch of the valetudinary about the “deare Squire.” It was not all fair mornings and larks and roses. One section of his little book of essays is devoted to “the accidents of an ague,” and deals with the invasion, the hot and cold fits, the letting of blood, the taking of physick, the syrups and other sweet things sent by the doctor, the want of sleep, the telling of the strokes of an ill-going clock in the night, the thief in the candle, the danger of death, the fear of relapse; and at the end, when Robyn is his own man again—the “reviewing and tacking together the several bills filed up in the Apothecary’s Shop.”
In the summer of 1647, Robert Boyle had been ill; but in the autumn he paid some visits among his relations, and early in 1648 he went to Holland, “partly to visit the country,” and partly to help his brother Frank conduct his brilliant wife home from The Hague—a mission that must have required all Frank’s sweetness of spirit and all Robyn’s philosophy. In the summer of 1648, Robert Boyle was again in London;—this time, Lady Ranelagh had taken rooms for him in St. James’s.
CHAPTER X
A KIND OF ELYSIUM
“This blessed plot, this Earth, this Realme, this England,
This Nurse, this teeming wombe of Royall Kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous for their birth,