SCIENCE AND MODERN POETRY 751 



so that man may develop into something much higher than 

 he is— 



Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages, 

 Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape. 



Or, on the other hand, he may pass away altogether : 



Many an aeon moulded earth before her highest, Man, was born, 

 Many an aeon too may pass when earth is manless and forlorn. 



The other point that seems to have struck Tennyson was 

 the possibility of a reversion. This becomes much more marked 

 in his later poems in which he looks back on life ; they are 

 naturally less optimistic than the earlier ones. In the earlier 

 poems he regards man as being an intermediate link in a chain 

 of an ever-progressing development. Later he is less confident, 

 and his lack of confidence is due to his wider experience and 

 completer knowledge of the complex relationships of life. In 

 Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After, we find this conception of 

 reversion quite clearly stated : 



Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, 

 And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud. 



He then goes on and gives the idea in its full significance : 



All the full-brain, half-brain races, led by Justice, Love, and Truth ; 

 All the millions one at length, with all the visions of my youth ? 



All diseases quench'd by Science, no man halt, or deaf, or blind ; 

 Stronger ever born of weaker, lustier body, larger mind ? 



Earth at last a warless world, a single race, a single tongue — 

 I have seen her far away — for is not Earth as yet so young? 



Every tiger madness-muzzled, every serpent passion-killed, 

 Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert till'd, 



Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles, 

 Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles. 



Warless ? when her tens are thousands, and her thousands millions, then — 

 All her harvests all too narrow— who can fancy warless men ? 



Warless ? war will die out late then. Will it ever ? late or soon ? 

 Can it, till this outworn Earth be dead as yon dead world the moon? 



And this reversion, he fears, has even now set in, for he 

 continues — 



Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time, 

 City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime ? 



