But, making all due acknowledgments to science, there is one danger attending it that the poet alone can save us from,—­the danger that science, absorbed with its great problems, will forget Man.  Hence the especial office of the poet with reference to science is to endow it with a human interest.  The heart has been disenchanted by having disclosed to it blind, abstract forces where it had enthroned personal humanistic divinities.  In the old time, man was the centre of the system; everything was interested in him, and took sides for or against him.  There were nothing but men and gods in the universe.  But in the results of science the world is more and more, and man is less and less.  The poet must come to the rescue, and place man again at the top, magnify him, exalt him, reinforce him, and match these wonders from without with equal wonders from within.  Welcome to the bard who is not appalled by the task, and who can readily assimilate and turn into human emotions these vast deductions of the savants!  The minor poets do nothing in this direction; only men of the largest calibre and the most heroic fibre are adequate to the service.  Hence one finds in Tennyson a vast deal more science than he would at first suspect; but it is under his feet; it is no longer science, but faith, or reverence, or poetic nutriment.  It is in “Locksley Hall,” “The Princess,” “In Memoriam,” “Maud,” and in others of his poems.  Here is a passage from “In Memoriam:”—­

“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.”

Or in this stanza behold how the science is disguised or turned into the sweetest music:—­

“Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow;
From fringes of the faded eve,
O happy planet, eastward go;
Till over thy dark shoulder glow
Thy silver sister-world, and rise
To glass herself in dewy eyes
That watch me from the glen below.”

A recognition of the planetary system, and of the great fact that the earth moves eastward through the heavens, in a soft and tender love-song!