t deal more science than he would at first suspect; but it is under
his feet; it is no longer science, but faith, or reverence, or poetic
nutriment. It is in "Locksley Hall," "The Princess," "In Memoriam,"
"Maud," and in others of his poems. Here is a passage from "In
Memoriam:"--

"They say,
The solid earth whereon we tread

"In tracts of fluent heat began,
And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
Till at the last arose the man;

"Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime,
The herald of a higher race,
And of himself in higher place
If so he type this work of time

"Within himself, from more to more;
Or, crown'd with attributes of woe,
Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not as idle ore,

"But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd with the shocks of doom

"To shape and use. Arise and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die."

Or in this stanza behold how the science is disguised or turned into the
sweetest music:--

"Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow;
From fringes of the faded eve,
O happy planet, eastward go;
Till over thy dark shoulder glow
Thy silver sister-world, and rise
To glass herself in dewy eyes
That watch me from the glen below."

A recognition of the planetary system, and of the great fact that
the earth moves eastward through the heavens, in a soft and tender
love-song!

But in Walt Whitman alone do we find the full, practical absorption, and
re-departure therefrom, of the astounding idea that the earth is a star
in the heavens like the rest, and that man, as the crown and finish,
carries in his moral consciousness the flower, the outcome, of all this
wide field of turbulent unconscious nature. Of course in his handling it
is no longer science, or rather it is science dissolved in the fervent
heat of the poet's heart, and charged with emotion. "The words of true
poems," he says, "are the tufts and final applause of science." Before
Darwin or Spencer he proclaimed the doc