THE NEW SCIENCE AND POETRY 139 



Ah! Avliat avails the curious search sustain 'd, 

 The finish 'd toil the God-like Science gain'd? 

 Sentenc'd to flames th' expansive wisdom fell, 

 And truth from Heaven was sorcery from Hell. ' '^^^ 

 The Wanderer looks out on the world with the curious, in- 

 quisitive eyes of the new philosophers. The poet parts company 

 Avitli the scientist only where an enthusiasm for beauty divides 

 itself from pleasure in the mere knowledge of truth. "The more 

 she (Science)", said Lowell shrewdly, "makes one lobe of the 

 brain Aristotelian, so much more will the other intrigue for an 

 invitation to the banquet of Plato ".^■''* And so The Wanderer, 

 entering into the knowledge which science drew from the skies, 

 gave to it the "impassioned expression" of poetry; for "poetry 

 is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge ".^^^ Thus stands 

 the poet-philosopher 



"Calm, on the beach, while maddening billows rave; 

 He gains philosophy from every wave; 

 Science from every object round he draws; 

 From various Nature, and from Nature's laws".^^® 

 This philosophic pleasure in the beauty of the world is re- 

 peated in Henry Brooke's poem. Universal Beauty (1735). The 

 ambitious poet seeks with "a daring unexampl'd" to "unfold the 

 universal frame". The Newtonian system finds here once more 

 an enthusiastic endorsement ;^^^ the earth has diminished to an atom 

 in the universe of worlds ;^^^ the elasticity of the air,^^^ the revela- 

 tions of the microscope — "nature's myriad minim race" — with their 

 exquisite workmanship,^**^ the marvelous construction of the human 

 frame^*^ are made a part of the universal beauty. Swept on by 

 the ardor of his poetic inspiration, Brooke prophesies new wonders 

 and new beauties yet to be revealed. 



^^ An Epistle to Robert Walpole. 



^** Latest Literary Essays, p. 182. 



*" Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1815. 



i»8 To John Powell, Esq. 



^Bk. III. 



i»8Bk. IV, 213. 



«»Bk. II, 334. 



i«>Bk. IV, 115. 



i"Bk. IV, 1-14. 



