the possibility that the disturbance of relations from which they suffered so keenly might ultimately be overcome. That the far-off future might at length bring "a solemn peace of its own"—this in serenest hours was their larger faith. Fortunately for the world, stronger poetic voices were already making themselves heard in the declaration that the epoch of readjustment might haply be near at hand. While some men were busy railing at the new science as dismal, prosaic, irreligious, and others were painfully asking whether, real and certain as were its revelations, they could ever come to mean anything to the soul of man, there were still those who, with greater receptivity and more prophetic vision, saw that the new science itself, when once sympathetically envisaged, could even perhaps for this generation provide the spiritual impulses, the religious and poetic fervor, which the old knowledge, with the philosophy of life belonging to it, had furnished for the generations gone by.
The mass of men, let us repeat, can only achieve this readjustment of their feelings to their knowledge, this emotionalization of newly acquired fact, by a slow and painful course of adaptation. The discoveries and inductions of science must grow familiar through habit and association before they can take a poetic or religious coloring for the average mind. But it is exactly here that a great poet's best work may be done. He can lead the way. Taking the generalizations of the scientist and the philosopher as they stand in exact and unimaginative statement, he may illumine them with his genius, and as he sets them in their proper light and pierces into their inner natures, the world, for the first time begins to apprehend their beauty and to seize their spiritual meaning. It is then that men are thrilled, as Emerson puts it, by the influx of a new divinity upon the mind. It is, in a word, his special mission and privilege to stand forth as the emotional interpreter of the intellectual and material movements of his age.
Hence arises the all-important question, Does our modern poetry show any tendency toward the absorption into itself of this vast mass of unemotionalized knowledge by which we now stand confronted? It is manifestly too early as yet to expect any full emotional development of this new material, but are there signs of a movement in this direction? Can we yet pass from the poetry of evasion and the poetry of skepticism to a poetry that we may fairly call the poetry of promise?
The name of Tennyson inevitably presents itself in this connection. In the writings of this poet—the last of the true Victorian brotherhood—we find, it need hardly be said, the sad, skeptical note of Arnold often enough repeated. Not planting himself, as Browning did, upon the strong rock of a transcen-
