Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/66

36. Imaginative genius is such that often one of its electric flames will come through what is ordinarily a non-conductor. That term, howbeit, cannot be applied to an American scientist who enjoys the distinction of being at once a master of abstruse mathematics and a brilliant writer of very poetic novels, and to whom I put the same question I have addressed to poets,—simply, What is poetry? He Letter from an imaginitive savant. repaid me with a letter setting forth in aptest phrase his own belief in the kindred imaginations of the physicist and the poet. Naturally he considers the physical discoverer just now more triumphant and essential. "His study," he says, "is relations. When he cannot discover them, he invents them,—strings his fact-beads on the thread of hypothesis." After some illustrations of this, he sets present research above past fancy, and exclaims: "Compare the wings of light on which we ascend with a speed to girdle the earth eight times a second, to sift the constitution of stars, with the steed of Mohammed and its five-league steps and eyes of jacinth! What a chapter the Oriental poet could give us to-day in a last edition of Job—founding the conception of the Unknown on what we know of his works, instead of on our ignorance of them. I want a new Paul to rewrite and restate the doctrine of immortality."

But here the poet may justly break in and say, It is not from investigators, but from the divine