378 the president's address. 



tion does not fully account for all the facts. The ancients, like the 

 moderns, were accustomed to go in great numbers to pleasant places 

 that were easy of access ; but we do not hear of their going at the 

 expense of great physical discomfort to spend a night on the summit 

 of a frozen Alp, in order to witness the sun rise from it, or doing 

 anything of a similar character. They loved nature in so far as her 

 aspects suggested comfort and enjoyment ; but the whole class of 

 poetic sensations based on the feeling of man's oneness with the rest 

 of the universe was almost entirely absent from their souls. 



Another important feature in the literary history of the nineteenth 

 century which is, I think, connected with the predominance of physi- 

 cal science in the intellectual world is the production of a consider- 

 able mass of verse which may be classed as the poetry of doubt and 

 negation. The leading feature of the poems belonging to this class 

 is that they deal with the religious aspect of the general scepticism 

 due to the scientific method. The prominent English names in this 

 school are Shelley, Tennyson, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Matthew 

 Arnold. Tennyson, indeed, falls into this class not on account of the 

 general character of his works, but on account of one single poem, 

 In Memoriam. That, however, is his best. The connexion of the 

 scepticism, which he fights and overcomes in that poem rather by 

 force of will than by argument, with the scientific movement is 

 shown by innumerable passages, many of which have become stock 

 quotations. Here is one of the most familiar : 



Are God and Nature then at strife 

 That Nature lends such evil dreams ? 

 So careful of the type she seems, 



So careless of the single life, 



That I, considering everywhere 



Her secret meaning in her deeds, 



And finding that of fifty seeds 

 She often brings but one to bear. 



I falter where I firmly trod. 



Matthew Arnold has, like Tennyson, fought his doubts and over- 

 come them ; but he has arrived at a much less definite belief. 



Clough and Shelley both died before reaching any very defined 

 belief. The nature of the former made him a pure doubter ; that of 

 the latter an asserter of negations. Shelley is not so much a poet of 

 doubt as of defiance. 



