LUCRETIUS AND THE EVOLUTION IDEA. 167 



But a simpler and perhaps more decisive proof of the near and 

 hospitable relations of poetry and science is presented in the cases of 

 their actual union in the same person. When imagination ceases to 

 be mistress and becomes servant to observation, your poet turns 

 scientist. When observation yields the scepter to imagination, your 

 scientist turns poet. The names of Maxwell, Tyndall, Romanes and 

 Huxley suggest themselves as examples of scientists of the first rank 

 whose poetic gift is manifest in their published poems. Of the poets 

 of the first rank who have shown the scientific turn and interest, one 

 thinks first of Tennyson. He studied medicine until he imagined that 

 he had all the diseases set out in the books. His interest in astronomy 

 he maintained to the time of the 'twilight and evening star.' From his 

 student days at Cambridge when 'the fairy tales of science' first won 

 him, even down to the 'Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,' he meditated 

 deeply on evolution. The scientists of his period looked upon him as 

 their most intelligent mouthpiece in the world of letters. Goethe, it is 

 well known, felt more satisfaction in his scientific achievements than 

 in the poems which made him the chief figure in German literature. It 

 was a comparatively small thing to have written 'Faust,' but to be the 

 only person of his century who understood the science of colors — that 

 was a thing to be proud of. 



Classic, as well as modern, literature offers illustrations of the 

 union of the poetic and the scientific interest. There are some extant 

 lines of Virgil headed, 'Virgil abandons other studies and embraces the 

 Epicurean Philosophy.' That this love of science — for ancient philos- 

 ophy included science — was no transient passion is attested by poems 

 on natural objects and by passages in the Georgics, the Eclogues and 

 the ^neid. His last fatal journey to Greece and Asia was undertaken 

 in order that he might complete the iEneid, and then devote the re- 

 mainder of his life to science. But in all the history of literature, the 

 best example of the fellowship of science and poetry is Lucretius, the 

 poet in whom we are here particularly interested; for he was not at 

 one time poet and at another time scientist, but rather both at once. 

 It is Mrs. Browning's judgment that Ijucretius 'died chief poet on the 

 Tiber-side,' and a Quarterly Reviewer has recently declared him to be 

 Rome's truest man of science. But such eminence in the two spheres 

 is paralleled in the case of Goethe. What makes the work of Lucretius 

 quite unique is the fact that his first-rate poetic capacity cooperates 

 with his capacity for science in the same task. The poet's imagina- 

 tion kindles into beauty the scientist's perceptions, and the issue is a 

 poetical treatise on physics and biology, or, if you prefer, a science 

 poem. 



It is true that a certain type of mind in the eighteenth century was 

 drawn to Lucretius, recognizing in him a sort of fellowship oi 



