Rare gifts of nature, the eye that reads the everlasting will, the apostleship of light, truth, liberty, the power to see the life and meaning beneath all forms,—such a man is verily sent of God.

Both Robert Browning and Mrs. Browning believed that poetry is, in the inception, an inspiration. "The more one sits and thinks over the creative process,' says Robert Browning in the recently published letters, "the more it confirms itself an inspiration, nothing more or less."

I do not mean to suggest that there is no difference between the inspiration of the noblest poetry and that of the writers of the Bible. But the difference lies in the purpose of each more than in anything else. The inspiration of the Bible is to give the historic revelation of Christianity; the inspiration of the noblest poetry is to interpret the facts of daily experience. They are in some sense complement and correlate of each other. As the Bible has been the food for the loftiest imagination, as its most spiritual truths make their appeal through imagination and feeling,cannot be understood without the poetic capacity, and often find their only suitable expression in the form of poetry itself; so poetry sustains the faculty of faith, casts over the common things of life an ideal light, pierces the veil of sense and reads the spiritual truths of man and the universe, is a witness for God and the spirit and immortality. It is not wrong to connect Mr. Darwin's loss of interest in Christianity with his waning love for poetry.

So an interpretation of the poets has its place in the studies of religion. Poetry belongs to polite learning (though one may dislike the word "polite"),-the necessary culture of a mind that loves truth and

beauty, the training of the necessary faculties of the spiritual life, imagination and emotion. But more than this: the great poets are voices to the soul. Dante and Goethe, Shakspere and Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson and Browning are prophets of the spiritual life as truly as Augustine and Luther and Calvin and Wesley and Newman. In a recent series of studies of great devotional helps, "In Memoriam," "Saul," and "Rabbi Ben Ezra" were rightly put with "Pilgrim's Progress" and "Holy Living and Dying." We have

the animating faith,

That poets even as prophets,

Have each his own peculiar faculty,

Heaven's gift, a sense that fits them to perceive
Objects unseen before.

The Poet-Prophets are the subtle interpreters of their time; they speak upon the house-top what is whispered in the ear: they voice the dim and intangible yearnings and visions of the many. And so they are not only the resultant expression of the generation, the word of the age-consciousness; but they mark the way of thought and life, become leaders, creators, of social and spiritual progress. But the man and his age are to be interpreted together. "No man," says Mr. Froude, "in single contact with the facts of his own time, could produce a Pallas, a Madonna, a King Lear. Such works are the result of a nation's spirit. And to interpret aright the higher message of modern English poetry, we must feel the forces it voiced and thereby helped to their dominance.

What in modern life has been creative? What have been the forces of the higher life of the last hundred years? They have been a new view of nature, a new

interest in man, a new spirit as to the problems of being scientific, democratic, religious. These are the forces that have profoundly stirred the hearts of men, made the last century creative, and lifted up its chosen souls as seers and singers.

The strongest single force of the century has been the scientific movement. Many of the sciences had been formed before: men had been observing the phenomena of nature and these were slowly modifying their ideas of the universe and of man; but not until the nineteenth century did the scientific habit become the ruling spirit, and a philosophy was formed of the facts observed that made essentially a new view of nature. It is the theory of Development. No doubt the idea of growth, of orderly progress, was long in the minds of men. It was as truly in the air as the thought of a new world before Columbus set sail from Palos. There were many hints and suggestions before Darwin gave it strict statement in Science and Spencer in Philosophy.

Miss Scudder, in "The Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets," says that "the chief poetic passages which treat directly the modern evolutionary conception are really prophetic, written before the new creed was fairly spoken. There are three great modern passages dealing with the universe as a whole in relation to man: the second and fourth acts of Shelley's 'Prometheus Unbound,' written in 1819; the lines in the last act of Browning's 'Paracelsus,' written in 1833; and parts of Tennyson's 'In Memoriam,' published in 1850. 'The Origin of Species' was not published till 1859; yet every one of these passages expresses a clear conception of evolution as distinct from the then current idea of spasmodic and special

creations." It may not be easy to find the truth in Shelley's bewildering dream of an unconscious universe gradually informed with conscious life and love; but Browning's lines leave no doubt as to his concep· tion of an evolution controlled and filled by God:

The center-fire heaves underneath the earth,
And the earth changes like a human face.
Thus God dwells in all,

From life's minute beginnings, up at last
To man, the consummation of this scheme
Of being, the completion of this sphere
Of life.

And more wonderful still is the prophecy of Tennyson in "In Memoriam,"-after the years of question and reflection still the poetic interpretation of development. It is the 118th song:

They say,

The solid earth whereon we tread

In tracts of fluent heat began,

And grew to seeming-random forms,
The seeming prey of cyclic storms,

Till at the last arose the man;

Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime,

The herald of a higher race,

And of himself in higher place,

If so he type this work of time

Within himself, from more to more;

Or, crown'd with attributes of woe
Like glories, move his course, and show
That life is not as idle ore,

But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd with the shocks of doom

To shape and use. Arise and fly

The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.

But has the scientific movement enriched the thought of men and given poetry a new inspiration? It does not seem to be the first effect of scientific study; and it is thought by many to be materialistic rather than spiritual, to lessen ideality by the removal of mystery, to clip the wings of imagination by its reverence for fact and law. Wordsworth voices the fear and the scorn of the worldly spirit that puts us out of tune with the true music of nature:

Great God! I'd rather be

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

But Wordsworth loved truth too well to fear the unveiling of science; he knew nature too well to fear that the study of man could do less than increase the wonder and divineness of being. He saw the richer field of imagination through the labors of men. "The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude. The poet, singing a song in which all human beings