820 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the possibility that the disturbance of relations from which they 

 suffered so keenly might ultimately be overcome. That the far- 

 off future might at length bring " a solemn peace of its own " 

 this in serenest hours was their larger faith. Fortunately for the 

 world, stronger poetic voices were already making themselves 

 heard in the declaration that the epoch of readjustment might 

 haply be near at hand. While some men were busy railing at the 

 new science as dismal, prosaic, irreligious, and others were painfully 

 asking whether, real and certain as were its revelations, they could 

 ever come to mean anything to the soul of man, there were still 

 those who, with greater receptivity and more prophetic vision, 

 saw that the new science itself, when once sympathetically envis- 

 aged, could even perhaps for this generation provide the spiritual 

 impulses, the religious and poetic fervor, which the old knowl- 

 edge, with the philosophy of life belonging to it, had furnished for 

 the generations gone by. 



The mass of men, let us repeat, can only achieve this readjust- 

 ment of their feelings to their knowledge, this emotionalization of 

 newly acquired fact, by a slow and painful course of adaptation. 

 The discoveries and inductions of science must grow familiar 

 through habit and association before they can take a poetic or 

 religious coloring for the average mind. But it is exactly here 

 that a great poet's best work may be done. He can lead the way. 

 Taking the generalizations of the scientist and the philosopher as 

 they stand in exact and unimaginative statement, he may illu- 

 mine them with his genius, and as he sets them in their proper 

 light and pierces into their inner natures, the world, for the 

 first time begins to apprehend their beauty and to seize their 

 spiritual meaning. It is then that men are thrilled, as Emerson 

 puts it, by the influx of a new divinity upon the mind. It is, in 

 a word, his special mission and privilege to stand forth as the 

 emotional interpreter of the intellectual and material movements 

 of his age. 



Hence arises the all-important question, Does our modern 

 poetry show any tendency toward the absorption into itself of 

 this vast mass of unemotionalized knowledge by which we now 

 stand confronted ? It is manifestly too early as yet to expect any 

 full emotional development of this new material, but are there 

 signs of a movement in this direction ? Can we yet pass from the 

 poetry of evasion and the poetry of skepticism to a poetry that 

 we may fairly call the poetry of promise ? 



The name of Tennyson inevitably presents itself in this con- 

 nection. In the writings of this poet the last of the true Vic- 

 torian brotherhood we find, it need hardly be said, the sad, 

 skeptical note of Arnold often enough repeated. Not planting 

 himself, as Browning did, upon the stroDg rock of a transcen- 



