ations has disappeared before common appliances
and familiar intercourse, there will be nothing to stimulate the
romantic fancy, nay, romance in any sort will but come into conflict
with man's ever-present realization of actual conditions.

Is this the just account? Is it just to the meaning of "poetry" or just
to the nature of mankind?

One might perhaps fall back on what a man of science declared to Mr.
Stedman: "The conquest of mystery leads to greater mystery: the more we
know, the greater the material for the imagination." Or one might assert
by right of intuition that, in face of the new world of science, we
shall feel as Shakespeare's Miranda felt in the presence of new
realities:--

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That hath such people in't!

We too may expect to call it a "brave new world," to exclaim "how
beauteous"--and not only how beauteous, but how awesome--"Nature is!"
"how many goodly creatures are there here!" And in this goodliness,
beauty, and awesomeness poetry will find unfailing material, while it
seeks to express the emotions they evoke and to relate them with power
to man's inner life. The objects of poetry are everywhere; and
Wordsworth, who should know, if any one can know, will have it that "the
remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist or mineralogist will
be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be
employed."

One might, then, simply fall back on statements such as these. But we
need a closer treatment. We require to see in what manner poetry and
science will work side by side as partners and not, as enemies, struggle
with each other until poetry is exterminated.

Whatever the future may be like, there are, and will be, two sides to
human life. There is the material, commonplace, and in a sense, vulgar
existence; there is also life's ideal side. Give a man, who is a man
and not a mere biped animal, all the comforts and enjoyments of physical
life, good food, good habitation, safety and health, even a clear
intellect, and give him nothing else. Would he not scorn and weary of
such a life as that, which merely adds empty day to empty day, so many
ciphers of existence, which, after all, amount to nothing? There is in
man, just in proportion as he rises above the beasts, a demand for
something which he holds more vital, for the things of the mind and
spirit. We live, not by br