THE NEW SCIENCE AND POETRY 141 



"This small nest, 



Stuck in a corner of the universe, 

 Wrapt up in fleecy cloud, and fine-spun air." 

 And of proud man he demands, 

 "What are thou? A beam, 

 A mere effluvium of his majesty; 

 And shall an atom of this atom-world 

 Mutter in dust and sin, the theme of heaven?" 147 

 Young, sordidly ambitious and in many respects meanly selfish as 

 a man, thus became the mouth-piece of new scientific ideas, and he, 

 who had come early in life to scoff at all science, remained to pray 

 in its very language. It is to be lamented that he never learned 

 to follow his own preaching, 



"Man's science is the culture of the heart". 148 

 And, finally, Akenside in the last year of this period published 

 his Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), in which he finds the same 

 source of inspiration. Again the poet's spirit soars through the 

 heavens, "where reason points the way". 149 The worlds on high, 

 "the forms of atoms moving with incessant change the elemental 

 round", "the melting rainbow's vernal-tinctur'd hues", all that 

 the "spacious West and the teeming regions of the South hold in 

 quarry" are to him material for poetry. And this poet, who des 

 pised the virtuoso with his studies of mites, his museums, his col 

 lections of rare plants, joined with Savage, Brooke, and Young to 

 praise the work of science in other fields. He prayed, in his Hymn 

 to Science (1739), for 



' ' The patient head, the candid heart, 



Devoted to thy sway". 



Those qualities were granted him in his later years when his medi 

 cal studies led him more thoroughly into the new experimental 

 philosophy. 



Just a word is needed here to summarize what has been said of 

 the appreciation of the new science among the poets. Through 

 the lenses of the telescope the poet's eyes first saw the beauties of 



IV. 



148 Bk. IX. 



149 Hymn to Science. 



