Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/63

Rh leap to greater discoveries, must have the poetic insight and imagination,—be, in a sense, a poet himself, and exchange the mask and gloves of the alchemist for the soothsayer's wand and mantle. Those of our geologists, biologists, mechanicians, who are not thus poets in spite of themselves must sit below the seers who by intuition strike the trail of new discovery. For beyond both the phantasmal look of things and full scientific attainment there is a universal coherence—there are infinite meanings—which the poet has the gift to see, and by the revelation and prophecy of which he illumines whatever is cognizable.

The so-called conflict of science and religion, in reality one of fact and dogma, has been waged obviously since the time of Galileo. Its annals are recorded. It was the sooner inevitable because science takes nothing on faith. The slower, but equally prognosticable, effect of exact science on poetry, though foreseen by the Lake School, was not extreme until recently,—so recently, in fact, that a chapter which I devoted to it in '''Cp. "Victorian Poets": pp. 7-21.''' 1874 was almost the first extended consideration that it received. Since then it has been constantly debated, and not always radically. That the poets went on so long in the old way, very much like the people who came after the deluge, was due to two conditions. First, their method was so ingrained in literature, so common to the educated world, that it sustained a beauteous phantasmagory