LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
themselves, and realize that they make no exception 
in our behalf. 
The superstitious ages, the ages of religious wars 
and persecutions, the ages of famine and pestilence, 
were the ages when man’s humanization of Nature 
was at its height; and they were the ages of the great 
literature and art, because, as we have seen, these 
things thrive best in such an atmosphere. Take the 
gods and devils, the good and bad spirits, fate, and 
foreknowledge, and the whole supernatural hier- 
archy out of the literature and art of the past, and 
what have we left? Take them out of Homer and 
Aeschylus and Virgil and Dante and Milton, and we 
come pretty near to making ashes of them. In mod- 
ern literature, or the literature of a scientific age, 
these things play an insignificant part. Take them 
out of Shakespeare, and the main things are left; 
take them out of Tennyson, and the best remains; 
take them out of Whitman, and the effect is hardly 
appreciable. Whitman’s anthropomorphism is very 
active. The whole universe is directed to Whitman, 
to you, to me; but Whitman makes little or no use of 
the old stock material of the poets. He seeks to draw 
into himself and to assimilate and imbuewith the hu- 
man spirit the entire huge materialism of the modern 
democratic world. He gives the first honors to sci- 
ence, but its facts, he says, are not his dwelling; — 
“I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.” 
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