method, took over more and more completely the
whole province of information, but it was not until the nineteenth
century that the last strongholds of the poetry of instruction were
stormed. I will, if you please, bring this home to you by an example
which may surprise you.

The subject which I have taken the liberty of discussing with you this
afternoon has not often occupied the serious attention of critics. But
it was attempted, by no less a person than Wordsworth, more than a
hundred years ago. I make no excuse for repeating to you the remarkable
passage in which he expressed his convictions in the famous Preface of
1800:--

"If 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 familiarised
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 po