SCIENCE AND POETRY 57 



expression of deep regret and anxious solicitude for the 

 future of some parts of our literature cannot be doubted, 

 and in so far they deserve to be treated by scientific 

 men with hearty respect and sympathy. But is there 

 really anything in the progress of science that is 

 inimical to the cultivation of the imaginative faculty 

 and the fullest blossoming of poetry ? The problems 

 of life — truth and error, love and hope, joy and sorrow, 

 toil and rest, peace and war, disease and death, here 

 and hereafter — will be with us always. From the 

 days of Homer they have inspired the sweet singers 

 of each successive generation of men, and they will 

 continue to be the main theme of the poets of the 

 future. As for the outer world in which we live, 

 the more we learn of it the more marvellous does it 

 appear, and the more powerfully does it make its mute 

 appeal to all that is highest and best within us. And, 

 after all, how little have we yet learnt ! How small 

 is the sum of all our knowledge ! It is still and ever 

 must be true that, in the presence of the Infinite, 

 1 the greater our circle of light, the wider the circum- 

 ference of darkness that surrounds it.' When the 

 man of letters complains that we have dethroned the 

 old gods, discarded the giants and witches, and erected 

 in their place a system of cold and formal laws that 

 can evoke no enthusiasm, and must repress all poetry, 

 has he never perceived how a true poet can pierce, 

 as our late Laureate could, through mere super- 

 ficial technicalities into the deeper meaning of things, 

 and can realise and express, in language that appeals 

 to the soul as well as to the ear, the divine harmony 

 and progressive evolution which it is the aim of science 



