Science, true daughter of Old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes, Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise, Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek for shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarund tree? [Footnote: _To Science_.] If this sort of complaint is characteristic of poets, how shall the philosopher refrain from charging them with falsehood? The poet's hamadryad and naiad, what are they, indeed, but cobwebby fictions, which must be brushed away if ideal truth is to be revealed? Critics of the poet like to point out that Shakespeare frankly confessed, Most true it is that I have looked on truth Askance and strangely, and that a renegade artist of the nineteenth century admitted, "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art." [Footnote: Oscar Wilde, _The Decay of Lying_.] If poets complain that all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy, [Footnote: _Lamia_.] are they not admitting that their vaunted revelations are mere ghosts of distorted facts, and that they themselves are merely accomplished liars? In his rebuttal the poet makes a good case for himself. He has identified the philosopher with the scientist, he says, and rightly, for the philosopher, the seeker for truth alone, can never get beyond the realm of science. His quest of absolute truth will lead him, first, to the delusive rigidity of scientific classification, then, as he tries to make his classification complete, it will topple over like a lofty tower of child's blocks, into the original chaos of things. What! the philosopher may retort, the poet speaks thus of truth, who has just exalted himself as the supreme truth-teller, the seer? But the poet answers that his truth is not in any sense identical with that of the scientist and the philosopher. Not everything that exists is true for the poet, but only that which has beauty. Therefore he has no need laboriously to work out a scientific method for sifting facts. If his love of the beautiful is satisfied by a thing, that thing is real. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"; Keats' words have been echoed and reechoed by poets. [Footnote: A few examples of poems dealing with this subject are Shelley, _A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_; Mrs. Browning, _Pan Is Dead_; Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_; Madison Cawein, _Prototypes_.] If Poe's rejection of The loftiest star of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane,