At our last meeting we endeavored to secure some solid basis for our ideas of form in general, and to develop thereupon some conceptions of form in art, and especially of literary form, which would enable us to see our way clear among misconceptions of this subject which prevail. We there addressed ourselves towards considering particularly three of these misconceptions. The first we examined was that which predicts the total death of imaginative literature--poetry, novels and all--in consequence of a certain supposed quality of imagination by virtue of which, like some ruin-haunting animals, it cannot live in the light; so that the destructive explanations of advancing science, it was apprehended, would gradually force all our imaginative energies back into the dark crevices of old fable and ruined romance, until finally, penetrating these also, it would exterminate the species. We first tested this case by laying it alongside the historic facts in the case: confining our view to England, we found that science and poetry had been developing alongside of each other ever since early in the seventeenth century; inquiring into the general effect of this long contact, we could only find that it was to make our general poetry greatly richer in substance and finer in form; and upon testing this abstract conclusion by a concrete examination of Tennyson--as a poet most likely to show the influence of science, because himself most exposed to it, indeed most saturated with it--we found from several readings in _In Memoriam_ that whether as to love or friendship, or the sacredness of marriage, or the pure sense of beauty, or the true relation of knowledge to wisdom, or faith in God, the effect of science had been on the whole to broaden the conceptions and to clarify the forms in which they were expressed by this great poet.