Poetry is the Art of Arts. If we desire to see what Science can do for it, let us take a typical piece wherein Fancy revels and plays like an Ariel with wreaths of lovely tropes,—say Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant,” for example. We must begin by cutting out all the absurdly unscientific statements; _e.g._, that the lily of the valley grows pale with passion, that the hyacinth rings peals of music from its bells, and that the narcissus gazes at itself in the stream. Then, in lieu of this folly, we must describe how the garden has been thoroughly drained and scientifically manured with guano and sewage. After this the flowers may be mentioned under their proper classes, as monandria and polyandria, cryptogams and phenogams. Such would be the result of bringing the Scientific Spirit to bear on Poetry. Introduced into the border realm of Fiction, it begins by marring with pedantic illustrations the otherwise artistic work of George Eliot. Pushed further, it furnishes us with medical novels, wherein the leading incident is a surgeon dissecting his aunt. Still a step onward, we reach the brute realism of “A Mummer’s Wife” and “La Joie de Vivre.” The distance between Walter Scott and Zola measures that between Art and Science in Fiction. To many readers it may appear that the antagonism of Science to Art may be condoned in favor of her high claim to be the guide, not to Beauty, but to Truth. But is it indeed _Truth_, in the sense which we have hitherto given to that great and sacred word, at which Physical Science is now aiming? Can we think of Truth merely as a vast heap of Facts, piled up into an orderly pyramid of a Science, like one of Timur’s heaps of skulls? To collect a million facts, test them, classify them, raise by induction generalizations concerning them, and hand them down to the next generation to add a few thousand more facts and (probably) to reconstruct the pyramid on a different basis and another plan,—if this be indeed to arrive at “Truth,” modern Science may boast she has touched the goal. Yet in other days Truth was deemed something nobler than this. It was the interests which lay behind and beyond the facts, their possible bearing on man’s deepest yearnings and sublimest hopes, which gave dignity and meaning to the humblest researches into rock and plant, and which glorified such discoveries as Kepler’s till he cried in rapture, “O God, I think thy thoughts after thee!” and Newton’s, till he closed the “Principia” (as Parker said of him) by “bursting into the Infinite and kneeling there.” In our time, however, Science has repeatedly renounced all pretension to throw light in any direction beyond the sequence of physical causes and effects; and by doing so she has, I think, abandoned her claim to be man’s guide to Truth. The Alpine traveller who engages his guides to scale the summit of the Jungfrau, and finds them stop to booze in the _Wirthschaft_ at the bottom, would