These remarks lead me naturally to the concluding section of my subject, in which I propose to inquire how far the discoveries of science have affected the relation of scenery to the imagination. It has often been charged against scientific men that the progress of science is distinctly hostile to the cultivation alike of the fancy and of the imagination, and that some of the choicest domains of literature must necessarily grow more and more neglected as life and progress are brought more completely under the sway of continued discovery and invention. We hear these complaints, now in the form of a helpless and hopeless wail, now as an angry and impotent protest. That they are made in good faith, and are often the expression of deep regret and anxious solicitude for the future of some parts of our literature cannot be doubted, and in so far they deserve to be treated by scientific men with hearty respect and sympathy. But is there really anything in the progress of science that is inimical to the cultivation of the imaginative faculty and the fullest blossoming of poetry? The problems of life--truth and error, love and hope, joy and sorrow, toil and rest, peace and war, disease and death, here and hereafter--will be with us always. From the days of Homer they have inspired the sweet singers of each successive generation of men, and they will continue to be the main theme of the poets of the future. As for the outer world in which we live, the more we learn of it the more marvellous does it appear, and the more powerfully does it make its mute appeal to all that is highest and best within us. And, after all, how little have we yet learnt! How small is the sum of all our knowledge! It is still and ever must be true that, in the presence of the Infinite, 'the greater our circle of light, the wider the circumference of darkness that surrounds it.' When the man of letters complains that we have dethroned the old gods, discarded the giants and witches, and erected in their place a system of cold and formal laws that can evoke no enthusiasm, and must repress all poetry, has he never perceived how a true poet can pierce, as our late Laureate could, through mere superficial technicalities into the deeper meaning of things, and can realise and express, in language that appeals to the soul as well as to the ear, the divine harmony and progressive evolution which it is the aim of science to reveal? Let me ask such a critic to ponder well the sonnet of Lowell's: 'I grieve not that ripe knowledge takes away The charm that nature to my childhood wore; For, with that insight, cometh, day by day, A greater bliss than wonder was before: The real doth not clip the poet's wings; To win the secret of a weed's plain heart Reveals some clue to spiritual things, And stumbling guess becomes firm-footed art.'