reconstruction of a shattered world. The passing of the old order of
dogmatic religion has left the modern world in a strange chaos,
craving for something in which it can unfeignedly believe, and often
following will-o'-the-wisps. Forty years ago, Matthew Arnold
prophesied that it would be for poetry, "where it is worthy of its
high destinies," to help to carry on the purer fire, and to express in
new terms those eternal ideas which must ever be the only sure stay of
the human race. It is not within the province of science to attempt a
post-Copernican justification of the ways of God to man; but, in the
laws of nature revealed by science, and in "that grand sequence of
events which"--as Darwin affirmed--"the mind refuses to accept as the
result of blind chance," poetry may discover its own new grounds for
the attempt. It is easy to assume that all hope and faith are shallow.
It is even easier to practise a really shallow and devitalising
pessimism. The modern annunciation that there is a skeleton an inch
beneath the skin of man is neither new nor profound. Neither science
nor poetry can rest there; and if, in this poem, an attempt is made to
show that spiritual values are not diminished or overwhelmed by the
"fifteen hundred universes" that passed in review before the telescope
of Herschel, it is only after the opposite argument--so common and so
easy to-day--has been faced; and only after poetry has at least
endeavoured to follow the torch of science to its own deep-set
boundary-mark in that immense darkness of Space and Time.




CONTENTS