CONCLUSION 1 83 



men with its transforming and quickening power, and was de- 

 veloping its subtle relationship with realism. Poets had begun to 

 learn that "observation and experience are the ballast needed to 

 give imagination steadiness"." The effects of the scientific ideas 

 were longer in making themselves felt than those of the classical 

 renaissance, because "national characteristics are never so strongly 

 marked in science and philosophy as in other branches of litera- 

 ture".'' The "painful discord" was not yet wholly harmonized; as, 

 indeed, it can never be. There is always a discord that is temper- 

 amental and irradicable. Lowell said, with Yankee shrewdness and 

 wit, that "the more she (Science) makes one lobe of our brain 

 Aristotelian, so much the more will the other intrigue for an in- 

 vitation to the banquet of Plato ".^ Edgar Allan Poe is an illustra- 

 tion of the point, in whom imagination, desiring to be free, picks 

 a half-whimsical quarrel with the demand of science for matters 

 of fact. — 



"Science! true daughter of old Time thou art! 

 Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. 

 Why preyest thou upon the poet's heart. 

 Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? 

 How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise? 

 To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies. 

 Albeit he soared with an undaunted Aving? 

 Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? 

 And driven the Hamadryad from the wood 

 To seek shelter in some happier star? 

 Hast thou not torn the naiad from her flood. 

 The Elfin from the green grass, and from me, 

 The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?"® 



Audience may be given to voices of three men of literary genius 

 from the nineteenth century, on the relationship between litera- 

 ture and science. In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1815, 

 Wordsw^orth wrote : — ' ' The knowledge both of the Poet and the 

 Man of science is pleasure ; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to 



'Neilson, W. A. The Essentials of Poetry, p. 137. 

 ''Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. IV, p. 308. 

 ^Latest Literary Essays, p. 183. 

 * Sonnet, To Science. 



