Ill 



SCIENCE AND THE POETS 



"TT is interesting to note to what extent the lead- 

 -^ ing literary men of our time have been influ- 

 enced, by science, or have availed themselves of 

 its results. A great many of them not at all, it 

 would seem. Among our own writers, Bryant, 

 Irving, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, show little 

 or no trace of the influence of science. The later 

 English poets, Arnold, Swinburne, Eossetti, do not 

 appear to have profited by science. There is no 

 science in Rossetti, unless it be a kind of dark, 

 forbidden science, or science in league with sor- 

 cery. Eossetti's muse seems to have been drugged 

 with an opiate that worked inversely and made it 

 morbidly wakeful instead of somnolent. The air 

 of his "House of Life" is close, and smells not 

 merely of midnight oil, but of things much more 

 noxious and suspicious. 



Byron, Shelley, Keats, Landor seem to have 

 owed little or nothing directly to science; Coleridge 

 and Wordsworth probably more, though with them 

 the debt was inconsiderable. Wordsworth's great 

 ode shows no trace of scientific knowledge. Yet 

 Wordsworth was certainly an interested observer of 



