Now, if we examine the course and progress of this poetry, born thus within the very grasp and maw of this terrible science, it seems to me that we find--as to the _substance_ of poetry--a steadily increasing confidence and joy in the mission of the poet, in the sacredness of faith and love and duty and friendship and marriage, and in the sovereign fact of man's personality; while as to the _form_ of the poetry, we find that just as science has pruned our faith (to make it more faithful), so it has pruned our poetic form and technic, cutting away much unproductive wood and efflorescence and creating finer reserves and richer yields. Since it would be simply impossible, in the space of these lectures, to illustrate this by any detailed view of all the poets mentioned, let us confine ourselves to one, Alfred Tennyson, and let us inquire how it fares with him. Certainly no more favorable selection could be made for those who believe in the destructiveness of science. Here is a man born in the midst of scientific activity, brought up and intimate with the freest thinkers of his time, himself a notable scientific pursuer of botany, and saturated by his reading with all the scientific conceptions of his age. If science is to sweep away the silliness of faith and love, to destroy the whole field of the imagination and make poetry folly, it is a miracle if Tennyson escape. But if we look into his own words, this miracle beautifully transacts itself before our eyes. Suppose we inquire, Has science cooled this poet's love? We are answered in No. 60 of _In Memoriam_: If in thy second state sublime, Thy ransomed reason change replies With all the circle of the wise, The perfect flower of human time; And if thou cast thine eyes below, How dimly character'd and slight, How dwarf'd a growth of cold and night, How blanch'd with darkness must I grow! Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore, Where thy first form was made a man, I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can The soul of Shakspeare love thee more. Here is precisely the same loving gospel that Shakspeare himself used to preach, in that series of Sonnets which we may call _his_ In Memoriam to his friend; the same loving tenacity, unchanged by three hundred years of science. It is interesting to compare this No. 60 of Tennyson's poem with Sonnet 32 of Shakspeare's series, and note how both preach the supremacy of love over style or fashion.