378 THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
tion does not fully account for all the facts. The ancients, like the 
moderns, were accustomed to go in great numbers to pleasant places 
that were easy of access ; but we do not hear of their going at the 
expense of great physical discomfort to spend a night on the summit 
of a frozen Alp, in order to witness the sun rise from it, or doing 
anything of a similar character. They loved nature in so far as her 
aspects suggested comfort and enjoyment ; but the whole class of 
poetic sensations based on the feeling of man’s oneness with the rest 
of the universe was almost entirely absent from their souls. 
Another important feature in the literary history of the nineteenth 
century which is, I think, connected with the predominance of physi- 
cal science in the intellectual world is the production of a consider- 
able mass of verse which may be classed as the poetry of doubt and 
negation. The leading feature of the poems belonging to this class 
is that they deal with the religious aspect of the general scepticism 
due to the scientific method. The prominent English names in this 
school are Shelley, Tennyson, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Matthew 
Arnold. Tennyson, indeed, falls into this class not on account of the 
general character of his works, but on account of one single poem, 
In Memoriam. That, however, is his best. The connexion of the 
scepticism, which he fights and overcomes in that poem rather by 
force of will than by argument, with the scientific movement is 
shown by innumerable passages, many of which have become stock 
quotations. Here is one of the most familiar : 
Are God and Nature then at strife 
That Nature lends such evil dreams? 
So careful of the type she seems, 
So careless of the single life, 
That I, considering everywhere 
Her secret meaning in her deeds, 
And finding that of fifty seeds 
She often brings but one to bear. 
I falter where I firmly trod. 
Matthew Arnold has, like Tennyson, fought his doubts and over- 
come them ; but he has arrived at a much less definite belief. 
Clough and Shelley both died before reaching any very defined 
belief. The nature of the former made him a pure doubter ; that of 
the latter an asserter of negations. Shelley is not so much a poet of 
doubt as of defiance. 
