LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 



themselves, and realize that they make no exception 

 in our behalf. 



The superstitious ages, the ages of religious wars 

 and persecutions, the ages of famine and pestilence, 

 were the ages when man's humanization of Nature 

 was at its height; and they were the ages of the great 

 literature and art, because, as we have seen, these 

 things thrive best in such an atmosphere. Take the 

 gods and devils, the good and bad spirits, fate, and 

 foreknowledge, and the whole supernatural hier- 

 archy out of the literature and art of the past, and 

 what have we left? Take them out of Homer and 

 iEschylus and Virgil and Dante and Milton, and we 

 come pretty near to making ashes of them. In mod- 

 ern literature, or the literature of a scientific age, 

 these things play an insignificant part. Take them 

 out of Shakespeare, and the main things are left; 

 take them out of Tennyson, and the best remains; 

 take them out of Whitman, and the effect is hardly 

 appreciable. Whitman's anthropomorphism is very 

 active. The whole universe is directed to Whitman, 

 to you, to me; but Whitman makes little or no use of 

 the old stock material of the poets. He seeks to draw 

 into himself and to assimilate and imbue with tlie hu- 

 man spirit the entire huge materialism of the modern 

 democratic world. He gives the first honors to sci- 

 ence, but its facts, he says, are not his dwelling; — 



"I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling." 



193 



