NATUEE IN THE NATURE POETS. 
39 
was said in the beginning, very good ; and both the poet 
and the natural philosopher have a mission towards this 
great good thing. The poet's mission is to make the good 
beautiful, whether in inanimate nature or in man ; and the 
business of the scientist, in both these same departments, 
is to make the good intelligible to man and useful for his 
well-being. I am going to treat this, if you will allow me, 
as a truth assented to by all. Doubtless, I shall say more 
in this paper about the one interpreter of the universe than 
the other. But I shall assume that they are friends to- 
gether. The soul of man is the common beautiful roof-tree 
of them both. 
When Tennyson speaks of 
" The fairy tales of Science," 
or of that crowning race he dreamed of, who 
Eye to eye and face to face 
Shall look on knowledge ; in whose hands 
Is Nature like an open book," 
we feel, not that we are carrying the war into an enemy's 
country, but that we are only removing a misunderstanding 
between essential friends, who only need just so much as 
that to embrace one another and clasp hands for evermore. 
It is the business of science to present us, after long and 
arduous search, with completed wholes, with a rainbow full- 
orbed, such as one sees from the summit of a hill ; and as 
for poetry, what the imagination loves is a completed and 
rounded whole. I know nothing, for example, more poetical, 
more captivating to the imagination, than the way in which 
some great geologist will picture for us, out of the fragments 
at his command, an entrancing picture of a world like, and 
yet unlike, ours, with other seas and other hills, with other 
flowers and trees, with other living creatures on the herb or 
