We note the assured volume of confidence, untroubled by the coming scientific avalanche. The actual date of the publication of the _Paradise Lost_ lies just beyond the epoch to which it belongs. It is the swansong of a passing world of untroubled certitude. A comparison between Pope’s _Essay on Man_ and the _Paradise Lost_ exhibits the change of tone in English thought in the fifty or sixty years which separate the age of Milton from the age of Pope. Milton addresses his poem to God, Pope’s poem is addressed to Lord Bolingbroke, “Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things To low ambition and the pride of kings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan;” Compare the jaunty assurance of Pope, “A mighty maze! but not without a plan.” with Milton’s “Just are the ways of God And justifiable to men;” But the real point to notice is that Pope as well as Milton was untroubled by the great perplexity which haunts the modern world. The clue which Milton followed was to dwell on the ways of God in dealings with man. Two generations later we find Pope equally confident that the enlightened methods of modern science provided a plan adequate as a map of the ‘mighty maze.’ Wordsworth’s _Excursion_ is the next English poem on the same subject. A prose preface tells us that it is a fragment of a larger projected work, described as ‘A philosophical poem containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.’ Very characteristically the poem begins with the line, “’Twas summer, and the sun had mounted high:” Thus the romantic reaction started neither with God nor with Lord Bolingbroke, but with nature. We are here witnessing a conscious reaction against the whole tone of the eighteenth century. That century approached nature with the abstract analysis of science, whereas Wordsworth opposes to the scientific abstractions his full concrete experience. A generation of religious revival and of scientific advance lies between the _Excursion_ and Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_. The earlier poets had solved the perplexity by ignoring it. That course was not open to Tennyson. Accordingly his poem begins thus: “Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen Thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove;”