Ambitious spirits!-- Whom earth, at this late season, hath produced To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh The planets in the hollow of their hand; And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains Have solved the elements, or analysed The thinking principle--shall they in fact Prove a degraded Race? Wordsworth had fifteen years earlier written more wisely, 'Poetry is the impassioned expression in the countenance of all science.' The latter-day Wordsworth, and Keats after him, should have realised that the discoveries of 'philosophy,' meaning science, create new mysteries while they solve the old, and leave the world as full of poetry as they found it: poetry, it may be, with its point of view shifted, poetry of a new kind, but none the less poetical. Leigh Hunt, in his review of _Lamia_ published on the appearance of the volume, has some remarks partly justifying and partly impugning Keats's treatment of the story in this respect:-- Mr Keats has departed as much from common-place in the character and moral of this story, as he has in the poetry of it. He would see fair play to the serpent, and makes the power of the philosopher an ill-natured and disturbing thing. Lamia though liable to be turned into painful shapes had a soul of humanity; and the poet does not see why she should not have her pleasures accordingly, merely because a philosopher saw that she was not a mathematical truth. This is fine and good. It is vindicating the greater philosophy of poetry. So far, this is a manifest piece of special pleading by Hunt on Lamia's behalf. If she is nothing worse than a being with a soul of humanity liable to be turned into painful shapes, why must Apollonius feel it his duty to wither and destroy her for the safeguarding of his pupil, even at the cost of that pupil's life? Her witchcraft must consist in something much worse than not being a mathematical truth, else why is he her so bitter enemy? Hunt proceeds, more to the purpose, to protest against the poet's implication--