752 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet, 

 Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street. 



There the master scrimps his haggard sempstress of her daily bread, 

 There a single sordid attic holds the living and the dead. 



There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor, 

 And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor. 



And yet in spite of all this he realises that it is a possibility 

 only and no more, and that we are really quite ignorant as to 

 the future — 



Far away beyond her myriad coming changes Earth will be 

 Something other than the wildest modern guess of you and me. 



Earth may reach her earthly-worst, or if she gain her earthly-best, 

 Would she find her human offspring this ideal man at rest? 



On the whole, however, he agrees that Evolution instils hope 

 into the human heart ; his last word is one of exhortation, and 

 he ends the poem by pointing out the necessity of hoping and 

 striving : 



Follow you the star that lights a desert pathway, yours or mine, 

 Forward, till you see the highest Human Nature is divine. 



Follow Light, and do the Right — for man can half-control his doom — 

 Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb. 



Forward, let the stormy moment fly and mingle with the Past. 



I that loathed have come to love him. Love will conquer at the last. 



Tennyson, as we have seen, kept pace with the advances of 

 modern thought. He of all the poets made most use of the 

 results arrived at by modern science without making his work 

 at all prosaic, or anything other than the highest and the best. 

 It is, in fact, this advance of Tennyson in keeping pace with the 

 strides of modern science and modern thought that makes him 

 the best example one can offer of the influence of science on 

 poetry ; from an examination of his work we can trace the 

 development of his mind with increasing years and that know- 

 ledge, wider experience, and fuller understanding that advancing 

 years alone can bring. 



It has been said that Browning had a firmer grasp of the 

 principle of Evolution, and that the science and philosophy of 

 the time probably made a deeper impression on him than it did 

 on Tennyson. Be this as it may, at any rate it is less apparent, 



