colorless ray of light, break it across a
prism, and catch upon a screen all the divine hues of the rainbow?

In some respects science has but followed out and confirmed the dim
foreshadowings of the human breast. Man in his simplicity has called the
sun father and the earth mother. Science shows this to be no fiction,
but a reality; that we are really children of the sun, and that every
heart-beat, every pound of force we exert, is a solar emanation. The
power with which you now move and breathe came from the sun just as
literally as the bank-notes in your pocket came from the bank.

The ancients fabled the earth as resting upon the shoulders of Atlas,
and Atlas as standing upon a turtle; but what the turtle stood upon was
a puzzle. An acute person says that science has but changed the terms
of the equation, but that the unknown quantity is the same as ever. The
earth now rests upon the sun,--in his outstretched palm; the sun rests
upon some other sun, and that upon some other; but what they all finally
rest upon, who can tell? Well may Tennyson speak of the "fairy tales of
science," and well may Walt Whitman say:--

"I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the
reasons of things;
They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen."

But, making all due acknowledgments to science, there is one danger
attending it that the poet alone can save us from,--the danger that
science, absorbed with its great problems, will forget Man. Hence the
especial office of the poet with reference to science is to endow
it with a human interest. The heart has been disenchanted by having
disclosed to it blind, abstract forces where it had enthroned personal
humanistic divinities. In the old time, man was the centre of the
system; everything was interested in him, and took sides for or against
him. There were nothing but men and gods in the universe. But in the
results of science the world is more and more, and man is less and
less. The poet must come to the rescue, and place man again at the top,
magnify him, exalt him, reinforce him, and match these wonders from
without with equal wonders from within. Welcome to the bard who is not
appalled by the task, and who can readily assimilate and turn into
human emotions these vast deductions of the savants! The minor poets do
nothing in this direction; only men of the largest calibre and the most
heroic fibre are adequate to the service. Hence one finds in Tennyson a
vas