SCIENCE AND MODERN POETRY 747 



intellectual giants as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. To the 

 immensity of space was added the immensity of time by Darwin 

 and his co-workers. Perhaps no scientific idea has been so 

 fruitful of results in its effects upon philosophy and religion, 

 for it was a discovery which at once caused a vague disquietude 

 in the minds of men. The universe ceased suddenly to be 

 homocentric. Man seemed to become at once utterly insig- 

 nificant ; a mere speck of animated dust ; a parasite of one of 

 the meanest of the planets. As Tennyson says : 



What are men that He should heed us? cried the King of sacred song; 

 Insects of an hour, that hourly work their brother-insects wrong, 

 While the silent Heavens roll, and suns along their fiery way, 

 All their planets whirling round them, flash a million miles a day. 



And again, in that awful, gloomy, pessimistic poem Despair, 

 he says : 



And the suns of the limitless Universe sparkled and shone in the sky, 

 Flashing with fires as of God, but we knew that their light was a lie — 

 Bright as with deathless hope — but however they sparkled and shone, 

 The dark little worlds running round them were worlds of woe like our own- 

 No soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below, 

 A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe. 



And yet again, in a more cheerful vein, he writes : 



For tho' the Giant Ages heave the hill 

 And break the shore, and evermore 

 Make and break, and work their will ; 

 Tho' world on world in myriad myriads roll 

 Round us, each with different powers, 

 And other forms of life than ours, 

 What know we greater than the soul? 



The immensity of time, too, is realised : 



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

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



It is small wonder indeed that the greatest minds have been 

 frightened and have recoiled in blank dismay from the concep- 

 tion of such immensity as this ! " Man began to wonder how 

 far he could still maintain moral laws and ideals of life formu- 

 lated under other and different conditions, conditions when he 

 was able to regard himself not only as the centre but as the 



