Much good paper has been lamentably wasted to prove that science has
destroyed, that it is destroying, or, some day, may destroy poetry.
Meantime, unblushing, unseen, and often unheard, the guileless poets have
gone on singing in a sweet strain. How they dare do the impossible and
virtually forbidden thing is a cause for wonder but not for legislation.
Not yet. We are at present too busy reforming the silent burglar and
planning concerts to soothe the savage breast of the yelling hooligan. As
somebody--perhaps a publisher--said lately: "Poetry is of no account now-
a-days."

But it is not totally neglected. Those persons with gold-rimmed
spectacles whose usual occupation is to spy upon the obvious have
remarked audibly (on several occasions) that poetry has so far not given
to science any acknowledgment worthy of its distinguished position in the
popular mind. Except that Tennyson looked down the throat of a foxglove,
that Erasmus Darwin wrote _The Loves of the Plants_ and a scoffer _The
Loves of the Triangles_, poets have been supposed to be indecorously
blind to the progress of science. What tribute, for instance, has poetry
paid to electricity? All I can remember on the spur of the moment is Mr.
Arthur Symons' line about arc lamps: "Hung with the globes of some
unnatural fruit."

Commerce and Manufacture praise on every hand in their not mute but
inarticulate way the glories of science. Poetry does not play its part.
Behold John Keats, skilful with the surgeon's knife; but when he writes
poetry his inspiration is not from the operating table. Here I am
reminded, though, of a modern instance to the contrary in prose. Mr. H.
G. Wells, who, as far as I know, has never written a line of verse, was