the labours of men of science,--Wordsworth said,--should ever
create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition,
and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will
sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the
steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect
effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the
midst of the objects of the science itself. 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, if
the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us,
and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers
of these respective sciences, thus familiarized to men, shall be
ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will
lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome
the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the
household of man.

It is plain, then, that, writing in the year 1800, Wordsworth believed
that a kind of modified and sublimated didactic poetry would come into
vogue in the course of the nineteenth century. He stood on the threshold
of a new age, and he cast his vatic gaze across it much in the same spirit
as we are trying to do to-day. But if any warning were needed to assure us
of the vanity of prophesying, it would surely be the error of one so
sublimely gifted and so enriched with the spoils of meditation. The belief
of Wordsworth was that the poetry of the future would deal, in some
vaguely inspired fashion, with the discoveries of science. But when we
look back over the field of 113 years, how much do we find our national
poetry enriched with ore from the mines of mineralogy or botany or
chemistry? It is difficult to see that there has been so much as an effort
made to develop poetry in this or in any similar direction. Perhaps the
nearest approach to what Wordsworth conceived as probable was attempted by
Tennyson, particularly in those parts of _In Memoriam_ where he dragged in
analogies to geological discoveries and the biological theories of his
time. Well, these are just those parts of Tennyson which are now most
universally repudiated as lifeless and jejune.

Wordsworth did not confine himself to predicting a revival of didactic
poetry, the poetry of inform