546 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE. 



POETRY AND SCIENCE. 



In spite of the occasional croak of 

 prophets of evil, poetry is not in danger 

 of being crowded out of the hearts of 

 men by the materialism of science. It 

 is true that just now there are no poets 

 of surpassing genius with whom the 

 reading public is popularly acquainted. 

 It is true that the development of our 

 material civilization through the sur- 

 prisingly rapid advance of scientific 

 discovery is a thing which engages at- 

 tention to a very great degree. It is 

 true that the necessity of dealing con- 

 tinually with practical, matter-of-fact 

 details, whether of the office, or the fac- 

 tory, or the laboratory, is not in itself 

 distinctly poetical. It is true that plan- 

 ning practical uses for the Rontgen 

 rays or liquid air is not essentially 

 stimulating to a love for poetry, but 

 this is only one aspect of the case. 



A great deal of the appeal of poetry 

 comes through what it suggests of the 

 unknown and mysterious, suggestions, 

 not of the strange and the fanciful, but 

 of the beautiful, hints of a something 

 beyond the beauty to which our eyes 

 have yet come, a beauty to which, per- 

 haps, for all our longing, they may 

 never come. A man for whom the prob- 

 lems of existence have ceased to be 

 problems, a man whose theology is a 

 settled thing, who believes certain 

 things definitely and rests with as- 

 sured ease in his belief, a man for whom 

 the vague anticipations of a world of 

 doubt as yet beyond his ken "make no 

 purple in the distance," such a man can 

 neither have appreciation for a wide 

 range of poetry, nor will he write verse 

 that can take any serious place as poe- 

 try for modern readers. The poetry of 

 a primitive people, dealing with primi- 

 tive emotions, finds in more elementary 

 things, like the boy in Wordsworth's 

 "Intimations of Immortality," hints 



and suggestions of a "something that is 

 gone," "the glory and the freshness of 

 a dream." These emotions become our 

 emotions sympathetically, and not be- 

 cause they are quite the normal feel- 

 ings for the mature reader of poetry 

 to-day. The things that were a won- 

 der to the Greek of Homer's time have 

 ceased to be a wonder to us, and if a 

 poet would excite the same feelings in 

 us he must employ other means. Sci- 

 ence, in giving us absolute knowledge 

 in regard to many things which not so 

 long ago were full of strangeness for 

 us, has taken out of them the olden 

 poetry and the trees have nymphs that 

 direct their growth no longer, the 

 streams that were once dsemon-haunt- 

 ed are now merely water courses, and 

 the other spirits of the earth and air 

 have gone far away into the world's 

 forgetful ness. But while we have been 

 pushing out into the unknown and an- 

 nexing portions of it to the region of 

 the known, we have been merely en- 

 larging the boundary, not obliterating 

 it. More than this man never can do. 

 Always beyond the farthest vision of 

 his telescope and microscope will lie the 

 unknowable, growing smaller, perhaps, 

 but seeming larger as it gives up 

 some of its secret places for the inhabit- 

 ing of the dwellers in the known. And 

 this is the significant thing, that, as 

 our knowledge grows, our sense of what 

 lies beyond that knowledge finds an in- 

 creasing number of things that may 

 excite wonder. Every new scientific 

 discovery, at least in certain depart- 

 ments of science, simply acts as an in- 

 dex finger pointing the way to related 

 phenomena not yet tinderstood. And so 

 it will be ever. The most learned man 

 that the schools, and the fields and the 

 sky aided by the finest instruments 

 human skill can devise, can produce, 

 will only find himself awed by the vast 



