44 THE NEW SCIENCE AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 



''Then we upon our globe's last verge shall go, 

 And view the Ocean leaning on the sky; 

 From thence our rolling neighbors we shall know, 

 And on the lunar world securely pry. 



Till I foretell from your auspicious care, 

 Who great in search of God and Nature grow; 

 Who best your wise Creator's praise declare, 

 Since best to praise his works is best to know. 



truly royal! Who behold the law 

 And rule of things in your Maker's mind; 

 And thence, like limbecs, rich ideas draw, 

 To fit the levelled use of human-kind." 80 



In the Epistle to Dr. Charleton there is high praise expressed for 

 the leading scientists of the century, "the assertors of free reason's 

 Claim". 



"The world to Bacon does not only owe 

 Its present knowledge, but its future too. 

 Gilbert shall live, till loadstones cease to draw, 

 And noble Boyle, not less in nature seen, 

 The circling streams, once thought but pools 

 From dark oblivion Harvey's name shall save." 81 



There is, besides, such a recent scientific experiment as the trans 

 fusion of blood poetized by Dryden in his lines to Mrs. Anne Killi- 

 grew, "Thy father was transfused into thy blood". But he had 

 already transferred her soul to some neighboring star, which 

 "moved with heaven's majestic pace"; the milder planets of the 

 old astrology had combined to shine on her auspicious horoscope; 

 and the spheres for her were musical, as Ptolemy had said. 82 Else 

 where also, as in the poem Upon the Death of Lord Hastings, and in 

 the lines To Sir Robert Howard, Dryden knows only the "dancing 

 crystal spheres ' ' and ' ' the atoms casually together hurled ' '. Even 

 when polishing Milton's Paradise Lost into heroic couplets in The 



80 Ibid. 653. 



81 Epistle to Dr. Charleton. 



Lines to Mrs. Anne Killigrew, 41-2, 489-90. 



