the stress of thought, and had filled
his poetry with light love and laughter and voluptuous despairs; the new
poets were to be no such gay triflers, but workers at a forge, beating
the glowing metal into shape, and singing as they toiled.[7] Carducci,
too, derisively contrasts the 'moonlight' of Romanticism--cold and
infructuous beams, proper for Gothic ruins and graveyards--with the
benignant and fertilizing sunshine he sought to restore; for him, too,
the poet is no indolent caroller, and no gardener to grow fragrant
flowers for ladies, but a forge-worker with muscles of steel.[8] Among
us, as usual, the divergence is less sharply marked; but when Browning
calls Byron a 'flat fish', and Arnold sees the poet of _Prometheus_
appropriately pinnacled in the 'intense inane', they are expressing a
kindred repugnance to a poetry wanting in intellectual substance and in
clear-cut form.

If we turn from the negations of the anti-romantic revolt to consider
what it actually sought and achieved in poetry, we find that its
positive ideals, too, without being derived from science, reflect the
temper of a scientific time. Thus the supreme gift of all the greater
poets of this group was a superb vision of beauty, and of beauty--_pace_
Hogarth--there is no science. But their view of beauty was partly
limited, partly fertilized and enriched, by the sources they discovered
and the conditions they imposed, and both the discoveries and the
limitations added something to the traditions and resources of poetry.
Thus:

(1) They exploited the aesthetic values to be had by knowledge. They
pursued erudition and built their poetry upon erudition, not in the
didactic way of the Augustans, but as a mine of poetic material and
suggestion. Far more truly than Wordsworth's this poetry could claim to
be the impassioned expression which is in the face of science; for
Wordsworth's knowledge is a mystic insight wholly estranged from
erudition; his celandine, his White Doe, belong to no fauna or flora.
When Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, paints the albatross of the
southern sea or the condor of the Andes, the eye of a passionate
explorer and observer has gone to the making of their exotic sublimity.
The strange regions of humanity, too, newly disclosed by comparative
religion and mythology, he explores with cosmopolitan impartiality and
imaginative penetration; carving, as in marble, the tragedy of Hjalmar's
heart and Angentyr's sword, of Cain'