begged question, that, inasmuch as the poet
imagines in things what is really not there at all, he is so far a
wanderer from the truth and an enemy of science. The answer is very
brief; the poet does not imagine something which is not there. A beauty
or a suggestion is a truth, and the poet sees a beauty or a suggestion.
He would indeed be false and an enemy to science if he said that a
primrose by the river's brim was a buttercup, or that it was red when it
is yellow, but it is no fiction when he declares that the primrose tells
him this or that of nature or of God. It may not tell the scientist
anything of the kind, but that is because the scientist does not look
for such a thing in it, does not understand or seek to understand its
language. "The eye of the intellect," says Carlyle, "sees in all objects
what it brings with it the means of seeing." Say, if you like, that it
is really the poet himself who puts the language, the message, into
flower or tree or waterfall. That only removes the argument a step
further back. How is he prompted to find such language there?

And who knows but that, by his exquisite sensibility and gift of
sympathy, the poet may be discovering truths more valuable to us in the
end than all the truths of science? The Newtons and Faradays and Lyells
perform their several tasks in the region of great literal physical
facts and laws; the Shakespeares and Wordsworths and Shelleys perform
theirs in the region of things ideal, in the expression of potent
suggestions and stimulations. We cannot afford to treat as weak
fantastic enthusiasts those to whom

The meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Nor can we too soon recognize the fact that what the world requires is
the combined result of both forms of genius. It requires that the genius
of science and the genius of poetry should unite their powers and their
discoveries into one grand harmony of happiness in faith and hope and
love.

One can do no better than quote from Wordsworth a passage which shows
how the moral mood is transformed through the medium of the eye, when
the eye gazes with poetic sympathy on nature:--

O then what soul was his, when on the top
Of the high mountains he beheld the sun
Rise up and bathe the world in light! He looked--
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,
And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
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