Today’s Poem: A Noiseless Patient Spider

Jonathan Edwards, Walt Whitman, and the last days of natural philosophy

Spider attempting to balloon (Wikimedia Commons)

In 1723, the twenty-year-old Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) — whom we may recall chiefly as the author of the 1741 “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the most enduringly famous sermon of the First Great Awakening in America — sent to Paul Dudley, a Massachusetts resident but also a member Royal Society …