Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/65

Rh him from utterly sacrificing his fortune, his good name, even herself, in the effort to manufacture diamonds. He tenderly grasps her in his arms, and her beautiful eyes are filled with tears. The infatuated chemist, wandering at once, exclaims: "Tears! I have decomposed them: they contain a little phosphate of lime, chloride of sodium, mucin, and water." Such is the last infirmity of noble minds to-day.

We latterly find our bards alive to scientific revelations. It has been well said that a '''Cp. "Poets of America": pp. 153-155, 262, 382.''' "Paradise Lost" could not be written in this century, even by a Milton. In his time the Copernican system was acknowledged, but the old theory of the universe haunted literature and was serviceable for that conception of "man's first disobedience," and the array of infernal and celestial hosts, to which the great epic was devoted. In our own time such a poet as Tennyson, to whom the facts of nature are everything, does not make a lover say, "O god of day!" but

Browning, Banville, Whitman, Emerson earliest and most serenely,—in fact, all modern intellectual poets,—not only adapt their works to physical knowledge, but, as I say, often forestall it. Even as we find them turned savants, we find Scientific intuitions. our Clerk Maxwells, Roods, Lodges, Rowlands, poets in their quick guesses and