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's doom, and Erinnyes never, like
those of Aeschylus, appeased. The Romantics had loved to play with
exotic suggestions; but the East of Hugo's _Orientales_ or Moore's
_Lalla Rookh_ is merely a veneer; the poet of _Qain_ has heard the wild
asses cry and seen the Syrian sun descend into the golden foam.

In the three commanding poets of our English mid-century, learning