146 THE NEW SCIENCE AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should 

 ever come when these things shall he familiar to us, and the rela- 

 tions under which they are contemplated by the followers of these 

 respective sciences shall he manifestly and palpahly material to 

 us as enjoying and suffering heings".^""^ The comic and satiric 

 representation of the new philosopher as a foolish, whimsical be- 

 ing, pursuing a kind of knowledge that was not "manifestly and 

 palpably material ' ' to the lives of men, no doubt delayed a genuine 

 appreciation of the value of scientific work. 



Furthermore, the poetry of this period is conspicuously emo- 

 tionless. Poets looked into their heads, not into their hearts, when 

 they wrote. They could not, therefore, be expected to understand 

 and interpret "the deepest convictions of their age". This is the 

 obvious reason that the great bulk of the verse of this time has 

 become a dead letter; for "the imaginative literature of an age 

 must express the genuine feelings of that age, or it will perish 

 still-bom ".^^^ And, finally, there is always a temperamental ele- 

 ment of discord, among the poets, between imagination and the 

 scientific spirit. 



no Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1815. 



"^ Stephens, Leslie, Hist, of Eng. Thought in 18th Cent., vol. II, p. 348. 



