And guides the planets in their course.


But a seer like Wordsworth will never be content to write tunes for
a text-book of physics, he boldly confounds the arbitrary limits of
matter and morals in one splendid apostrophe to Duty:-


Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.


Poets, it is said, anticipate science; here in these four lines is
work for a thousand laboratories for a thousand years. But the
truth has been understated; every writer and every speaker works
ahead of science, expressing analogies and contrasts, likenesses
and differences, that will not abide the apparatus of proof. The
world of perception and will, of passion and belief, is an
uncaptured virgin, airily deriding from afar the calculated
advances and practised modesty of the old bawd Science; turning
again to shower a benediction of unexpected caresses on the most
cavalier of her wooers, Poetry. This world, the child of Sense and
Faith, shy, wild, and provocative, for ever lures her lovers to the
chase, and the record of their hopes and conquests is contained in
the lover's language, made up wholly of parable and figure of
speech. There is nothing under the sun nor beyond it that does not
concern man, and it is the unceasing effort of humanity, whether by
letters or by science, to bring "the commerce of the mind and of