58 THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 
Tennyson wrote under the sunlight of a later and clearer 
science— 
“¢ This world was once a fluid haze of light, 
Till toward the centre set the starry tides, 
And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast 
The planets.” 
The Muse of Poetry and Urania, her sister, clasped hands, and 
‘have in all ages sung to the world the sweet rhymes of Mother 
Nature. But Milton’s muse did not as beautifully and as fully 
interpret the teachings of Urania as Tennyson’s muse in the 
“Princess.” When the Divine Fiat theory is propounded mankind 
says, ‘‘What effort.” When the Creation theory of growing from 
more to more under a Divine Architect is explained then mankind 
says, ““What power and also what wisdom.” Ruskin writes: ‘Is 
not the evidence of ease on the very front of all the greatest works 
in existence? Do they not say plainly to us not ‘there has been a 
great effort here,’ but ‘there has been a great power here’ ?” 
In conclusion let me say that changes in human ideas and the 
rapid advance of science have to a large extent thrown the poem 
into conflict with present day knowledge of the physical universe. 
Had Milton’s astronomy been more modern and had he clothed its 
truer principles with that glorious imagery that flowed from him in 
such harmonious numbers, would the poem have been more pleas- 
ing because more scientific and equally poetic? It is, I think, 
reasonably clear that if Milton had adopted the evolutionary theory 
of creation we could have had no “ Paradise Lost.” It would have 
lost its dramatic power and its dynamic fervor. Satan was to launch 
into space and decry a completely created world, and to visit and 
tempt and ruin a completely created man. He could not have been 
depicted as watching through eons of time a slowly revolving habit- 
able globe and wait for milléniums to visit a prehistoric vertebrate 
growing to completeness and acquiring knowledge and reason and 
conscience, and then to destroy him mortally. 
The first three chapters of Genesis constitute an oriental poem 
in prose, teaching deep spiritual truths, and not, when properly 
understood, unscientific, and Milton has made of all that an occi- 
dental poem in blank verse. The world is all the richer and better 
for this, but no evolutionary theory could have brought forth such 
