POETRY AND SCIENCE. 817 



thetic emotions of Keats lagged far behind the intellectual 

 achievements of his time ; and it was the consequent maladjust- 

 ment that caused him to cling so persistently to that old order of 

 ideas, to that cosmology of marvel and catastrophe which he felt 

 to be slipping away from the world with all the beautiful accumu- 

 lation of legend and myth which in the course of many centuries 

 had come to cluster about it. To him " glory and loveliness " had 

 indeed " passed away " from the present, and could be sought 

 only in the things that the general world was rapidly outgrowing ; 

 and hence it was to these dead things alone to Greek fable or 

 mediaeval story that he could turn to find the beauty that was to 

 be to him a joy forever. 



But though in Keats's day the ocean of knowledge was slowly 

 rising on every side, he had no hint of that great tidal wave of 

 new ideas which has carried us so rapidly forward with its resist- 

 less roll. It is little to say that during the past half century the 

 consequent emotional perturbation has been greater than the world 

 ever experienced before ; for the single generalization of evolution 

 has disturbed the equilibrium of which we have spoken to an ex- 

 tent hitherto undreamed of. We face the universe from a new 

 standpoint ; our relations to Nature are altered ; the problems of 

 life, so often analyzed, so much discussed in the past, meet us in 

 unfamiliar forms. Amid the Babel of tongues and the fierce 

 clash of ideas and purposes to which all this has given rise, the 

 poetry of evasion has still made its voice heard and its influence 

 felt. In the works of Rossetti and the earlier writings of William 

 Morris (The Earthly Paradise and the other poems antedating his 

 conversion to socialism) we have the artistic traditions of Keats 

 carried on with unmistakable success; the mediaeval mood and 

 attitude, however, replacing the pagan mood and attitude of the 

 earlier bard. Both these m.en, too, sought to make their escape 

 through the imagination from the life of their own time from 

 the rapid material changes going on in every direction, and from 

 the speculation and inquiry with which the whole air is alive. 

 The prelude to The Earthly Paradise, taken even by itself, makes 

 Morris's position sufficiently clear, and to understand Rossetti's we 

 have only to remember his own declaration of his belief that it 

 concerned men and women far more to attend to the form of their 

 tables and chairs than to bother about the doctrine of the con- 

 servation of energy and the hypothesis of natural selection. 



Meanwhile, in the early years of the modern upheaval, a note 

 of deeper meaning made itself heard the outcry of earnest na- 

 tures, conscious of the breaking down of old standards, but doubt- 

 ful as yet of the spiritual import and tenor of the iconoclastic 

 forces at work. To turn from the poems of Keats, Rossetti, and 

 Morris, to the poems of Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew 



VOL. XLV. 59 



