218 BIRDS AND POETS 
poet to-day than they were in the times of Homer 
ot Isaiah. Science, therefore, does not restrict the 
imagination, but often compels it to longer flights. 
The conception of the earth as an orb shooting like 
a midnight meteor through space, a brand cast by 
the burning sun with the fire at its heart still un- 
quenched, the sun itself shooting and carrying the 
whole train of worlds with it, no one knows whither, 
— what a lift has science given the imagination in 
this field! Or the tremendous discovery of the cor- 
relation and conservation of forces, the identity and 
convertibility of heat and force and motion, and that 
no ounce of power is lost, but forever passed along, 
changing form but not essence, is a poetic discovery 
no less than a scientific one. The poets have always 
felt that it must be so, and, when the fact was au- 
thoritatively announced by science, every profound 
poetic mind must have felt a thrill of pleasure. Or 
the nebular hypothesis of the solar system, — it seems 
the conception of some inspired madman, like Wil- 
liam Blake, rather than the cool conclusion of rea- 
son, and to carry its own justification, as great 
power always does. Indeed, our interest in astron- 
omy and geology is essentially a poetic one, —the 
love of the marvelous, of the sublime, and of grand 
harmonies. The scientific conception of the sun is 
strikingly Dantesque, and appalls the imagination. 
Or the hell of fire through which the earth has 
passed, and the exons of monsters from which its 
fair forms have emerged, — from which of the seven 
circles of the Inferno did the scientist get nis hint? 
