POETRY AND SCIENCE. 821 



dental philosophy, he was shaken by storms of donbt and diffi- 

 culty that seemed to have nothing but a tonic effect upon his 

 more robust contemporary. Struggle, uncertainty, hesitation are 

 revealed throughout the whole of his work ; he holds his faith 

 with infinite effort; even In Memoriam, as he told Mr. James 

 Knowles, was more sanguine than the man himself ; and he got 

 but little beyond a " faint trust " of " the larger hope." Yet there 

 are other sides to Tennyson's writings that reveal the man in a 

 very different light. His keen interest in science ; his sympa- 

 thetic hold upon the vast movements in progress around him ; his 

 manly attitude toward the changes that life and thought were 

 everywhere undergoing ; his reiterated belief that we are but in 

 the morning of the times the " rich dawn of an ampler day " ; his 

 faith, only now and then shaken, in the years that are still to 

 come all these characteristics combine to render Tennyson the 

 most intensely modern of all our modern poets. 



"Let knowledge grow from more to more, 

 But more of reverence in us dwell, 

 That raiud and soul, according well, 

 May make one music, as before. 

 But vaster.'" 



There is the very index to Tennyson's intellectual position. 

 And a very casual reading of his collected works will suffice to 

 show how large an expression many of our new scientific concep- 

 tions find in his utterances. The underlying principle of all our 

 modern thought the doctrine of the universality of law, and of 

 that orderly progression or development within the domain and 

 under the influence of law which we call evolution these princi- 

 ples constitute the firm foundation of the entire fabric of his 

 philosophy of life ; they characterize his attitude toward the ex- 

 ternal world ; they mold all his social and ethical teaching ; out 

 of them grows his faith in the destiny of the race, his hope for 

 the untried future. For him, man is as yet " being made " ; the 

 "brute inheritance" clings about him; but, because so much has 

 already been accomplished, much more will be accomplished by 



and by. 



"This fine old earth of ours is but a child 



Yet in the go-cart. Patience! Give it time 



To learn its limbs. There is a hand that guides." 



Above all things, it seems to me significant that, with all the 

 reaction against the cry of progress that undoubtedly marks some 

 of his later poems, the evolutionary note comes out with ever- 

 increasing strength to the very end. It should not be forgotten 

 that such poems as The Dawn, The Dreamer, and The Making of 

 Man all belong to his last published volume. 



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