THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 51 



quoted by Stedman : " Balthazar's wife, suffering agonies, makes 

 an attempt to dissuade him from utterly sacrificing his fortune, his 

 good name, even herself, in the effort to manufacture diamonds. He 

 tenderly grasps her in his arms, and her beautiful eyes are filled with 

 tears. The infatuated chemist, wandering at once, exclaims : ' Tears ! 

 I have decomposed them ; they contain a little phosphate of lime, 

 chloride of sodium, mucin and water.' Such is the ' last infirmity of 

 noble minds ' to-day." A poetic mind will prompt one to pluck a 

 flower, and by gazing on it with rapt attention, rise to an appreciation 

 of its beauty and feel himself the nobler for it ; a scientist will pull 

 it to pieces, separate it into stamen, petal, stem, root, etc., and be 

 satisfied with being able to catalogue it correctly. 



"A primrose by the river's brim, 

 A yellow primrose was to him, 

 And it was nothing more. " 



It possesses for him no suggestiveness from associations, which 

 is one of the strongest elements in poetry. 



The difference then between science and poetry is : the one 

 analyses, the other spiritualises. And these two things cannot be 

 reconciled. One writer, Prof. W. H. Hudson, in an article in the 

 Popular Science Monthly on the subject of Poetry and Science, holds 

 that "the business of the poet in his capacity of spiritual teacher is 

 to help us to clothe fact with the beauty of fancy ; not to try to force 

 fancy into the place of fact. Let us understand what is scientifically 

 true, socially right, and our feelings will adjust themselves in due 

 course. It is for science to lead the way, and the highest mission 

 of the poet is ever to follow in its wake, and in the name of poetry 

 and religion claim each day's new thought as its own " Surely a 

 strange claim this for science to make in regard to poetry, which 

 antedates it by a thousand years ! There is a dash of truth in the 

 words, because the poet must have some facts to build on, but the 

 writer shows most emphatically that he does not understand the true 

 nature of poetry. If what he says be true, what chance was there 

 for the ancients of the earth to rise to any loftiness of poetic thought? 

 Science has demolished the old beliefs in the method of the creation 

 of the world ; does that detract from the grandeur and glory of the 

 Hebrew poetry ? It should if poetry is always to be found in the 

 wake of science. Plato believed that the earth was flat, no doubt ; 



