etry 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 information, such as, in a very crude form, had
prevailed all over Europe in his own childhood, but he conceived a wide
social activity for writers of verse. He foresaw that the Poet would
"bind together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human
society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time." I
suppose that in composing those huge works, so full of scattered
beauties, but in their entirety so dry and solid, _The Excursion_ and
_The Prelude_, he was consciously attempting to inaugurate this scheme
of a wide and all-embracing social poetry. Nor do I suppose that efforts
of this kind will ever cease to be made. We have seen a gifted writer in
whom the memory is perhaps even more surprisingly developed than the
imagination, employ the stores of his experience to enrich a social
poetry the elements of which, prima facie, should be deeply attractive
to us all. But I do not know that the experiments of Mr. Rudyard
Kipling, brilliant as they are, are calculated to encourage the poets of
the future to pursue their lyric celebration of machinery and sociology
and the mysteries of natural religion. Already is it not that portion of
his work which we approach with most languor, in spite of its
originality and its outlook upon "the vast empire of human society"? And
lesser poets than he who seek for popularity by such violent means are
not, I think, rewarded by the distinguished loyalty of the best readers.
We are startled by their novelty, and we admire them for the moment; but
when, a few years later, we return to them, we are apt to observe with
distress how

"their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw."

If, therefore, I venture upon a prophecy, where all the greater
prophets, my predecessors, have failed, it is to su