70 INDOOR STUDIES 



the scientific progress of his age, and was the first 

 to indicate the conditions under which the poet 

 could avail himself of the results of physical science. 

 "The Poet," he says, "writes under one restriction 

 only, namely, that of the necessity of giving im- 

 mediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that 

 information which may he expected from him, not 

 as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, 

 or a natural philosopher, hut as a Man." "The 

 knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of Sci- 

 ence," he again says, "is pleasure: but the know- 

 ledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part 

 of our existence, our natural and unalienable in- 

 heritance; the other, as a personal and individual 

 acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual 

 and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow- 

 beings. " In reaching his conclusion, he finally says : 

 "The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Bot- 

 anist, or Mineralogist will be as proper objects of 

 the Poet's art as any upon which it can be em- 

 ployed, if the time should ever come when these 

 things shall be familiar to us, and the relations 

 under which they are contemplated by the followers 

 of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and 

 palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering 

 beings. If the time should ever come when what 

 is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall 

 be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and 

 blood, the Poet will lend this divine spirit to aid 

 the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being 

 thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the 



