376 THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
with regard to the past to be subjected to a raking cross-fire. Much 
has been shown to be unworthy of credence, but the separation of 
the wheat of history from the chaff, as far as it has been accom- 
plished, has been a work of great value. 
In the study of languages also the scientific method has been 
adopted. But perhaps the most remarkable thing to which attention 
can be directed in this connection is the rise eontemporaneously with 
the scientific and democratic movements of last century of a race of 
poets manifesting a sympathy with nature in all her moods never 
exhibited before. It has often been remarked that the feeling for 
the beautiful and the sublime in the external world is much stronger 
in modern than in ancient poets. It has often also been remarked 
that there was a great revival of the love for external nature in the 
poets who flourished in England at the end of the eighteenth and the 
beginning of the nineteenth century. Ruskin, for example, has 
noticed that the sense of colour is more highly developed in modern 
than in ancient writers, and in speaking of Scott, he directs attention 
to the way in which he looks at nature “as having an animation and 
pathos of its own wholly irrespective of human presence or passion.” 
It has, I believe, never before been suggested that this is connected 
with the great development of the sciences of observation. Yet 
there is some reason for thinking that it is. I must not, however, 
be understood to say that the greater intensity of this particular 
poetic feeling is the effect of our scientific progress. It may be to 
some extent its cause; but it would perhaps be more correct to 
speak of both as different phases of, and alike due to the influences 
which have given its special characteristics to the intellectual growth 
of modern times. 
Not only, however, are modern poets distinguished by a deeper 
feeling for the aspects of external nature ; they also observe it with 
a minute and scientific accuracy. Read, for example, the beginning 
of Enoch Arden : 
Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm ; 
And in the chasm are foam and yellow sand ; 
Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharf 
In cluster ; then a moulder’d church ; and higher 
A long street climbs to one tall-tower’d mill ; 
And high in heaven behind it a gray down 
With Danish barrows ; and a hazel-wood 
By autumn nutters haunted flourishes 
Green in a cup-like hollow of the down. 
