[In the following essay, Burroughs looks at nineteenth-century literary figures, including Keats, Tennyson, Emerson, and Carlyle, to assess the extent to which these writers were influenced by science.]

It is interesting to note to what extent the leading literary men of our country and time have been influenced by science, or have availed themselves of its results. A great many of them not at all, it would seem. Among our own writers Bryant, Irving, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, show little or no trace of the influence of science. The later English poets, Arnold, Swinburne, Rossetti, do not appear to have profited by science. There is no science in Rossetti, unless it be a kind of dark, forbidden science, or science in league with sorcery. Rossetti's muse seems to have been drugged with an opiate that worked inversely and made it morbidly wakeful instead of somnolent. The air of his “House of Life” is close, and smells not merely of midnight oil, but of things much more noxious and suspicious.

Byron, Shelley, Keats, Landor, seem to have owed little or nothing directly to science; Coleridge and Wordsworth probably more, though with them the debt was inconsiderable. Wordsworth's great ode shows no trace of scientific knowledge. Yet Wordsworth was certainly an interested observer of the scientific progress of his age, and was the first to indicate the conditions under which the poet could avail himself of the results of physical science. “The Poet,” he says, “writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man.” “The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of Science,” he again says, “is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other as a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow beings.” In reaching his conclusion, he finally says: “The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend this divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.” To clothe science with flesh and blood, to breathe into it the breath of life, is a creative work which only the Poet can do. Several of the younger poets, both in this country and in England, have made essays in this direction, but with indifferent success. It is still science when they have done with it, and not poetry. The transfiguration of which Wordsworth speaks is not perfect. The inorganic has not clearly become the organic. Charles DeKay has some good touches, but still the rock is too near the surface. The poetic covering of vegetable mold is too scanty. More successful, but still rather too literal, are several passages in Mr. Nichols' “Monte Rosa.” A passage beginning on page 9,

“Of what was doing on earth
Ere man had come to see,”

is good science and pretty good poetry.

And that unlettered time slipped on,
Saw tropic climes invade the polar rings,
The polar cold lay waste the tropic marge;
Saw monster beasts emerge in ooze and air,
And run their race and stow their bones in clay;
Saw the bright gold bedew the elder rocks,
And all the gems grow crystal in their caves;
Saw plant wax quick, and stir to moving worm,
And worm move upward, reaching toward the brute;
Saw brute by habit fit himself with brain,
And startle earth with wondrous progeny;
Saw all of these, and still saw no true man,
For man was not, or still so rarely was,
That as a little child his thoughts were weak,
Weak and forgetful and of nothing worth,
And Nature stormed along her changeful ways
Unheeded, undescribed, the while man slept
Infolded in his germ, or with fierce brutes,
Himself but brutal, waged a pigmy war,
Unclad as they, and with them housed in caves,
Nor knew that sea retired or mountain rose.”

Whether the science in this and similar passages, with which Mr. Nichols' epic abounds, has met with a change of heart and become pure poetry, may be questioned. There is a more complete absorption of science and the emotional reproduction of it in Whitman, as there is also in Tennyson. “In Memoriam” is full of science winged with passion.

Tennyson owes a larger debt to physical science than any other current English poet, Browning the largest debt to legerdemain or the science of jugglery. Occasionally Tennyson puts wings to a fact of science very successfully, as in his “The Dragon Fly”:

“To-day I saw the dragon fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.
An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk; from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.
“He dried his wings; like gauze they grew;
Through crofts and pastures wet with dew
A living flash of light he flew.”

Keats' touches are often accurate enough for science, and free and pictorial enough for poetry.

“Here are sweet peas, on tiptoe for a flight;
With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white,
And taper fingers catching at all things,
To bind them all about with tiny rings.”

Or this by a “streamlet's rushy banks”:

“Where swarms of minnows show their little heads,
Staying their wavy bodies 'gainst the streams,
To taste the luxury of sunny beams
Temper'd with coolness, how they ever wrestle
With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle
Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand!”

Only a naturalist can fully appreciate Keats' owl—“the downy owl,” as the quills and feathers of this bird are literally tipped with down, making it soft to the hand and silent in its flight.

On the other hand, it takes a poet to fully appreciate Linnæus' marriage of the planets and his naming of the calyx the thalamus, or bridal chamber; and the eorolla, the tapestry of it.

The two eminent poets of our own language whose attitude toward science is the most welcome and receptive are undoubtedly Emerson and Whitman, the former especially. No other imaginative writer seems to have been so stimulated and aroused by the astounding discoveries of physics. There was something in the boldness of science, in its surprises, its paradoxes, its affinities, its attractions and repulsions, its circles, its compensations, its positive and negative, its each in all, its all in each, its subtle ethics, its modulations, its perpetuity and conservation of forces, its spires and invisible germs in the air, its electricity, its mysteries, its metamorphoses, its perception of the unity, the oneness of nature, etc.,—there was something in all these things that was peculiarly impressive to Emerson. They were in the direction of his own thinking; they were like his own startling affirmations. He was constantly seeking and searching out the same things in the realm of ideas and of morals. In his laboratory you shall witness wonderful combinations, surprising affinities, unexpected relations of opposites, threads and ties unthought of.

Emerson went through the cabinet of the scientist as one goes through a book-stall to find an odd volume to complete a set; or through a collection of pictures, looking for a companion piece. He took what suited him, what he had use for at home. He was a provident bee exploring all fields for honey, and he could distill the nectar from the most unlikely sources. Science, for its own sake, he perhaps cared little for, and on one occasion refers rather disdainfully to “this post-mortem science.” Astrology, he says, interests us more, “for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star.” “The human heart concerns us more than the peering into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.” But where he could turn science over and read a moral on the other side, then he valued it—then the bud became a leaf on a flower instead of a thorn.

While in London in 1848 he heard Faraday lecture in the Royal Institute on dia, or cross magnetism, and Emerson instantly caught at the idea as applicable in metaphysics. “Dia-magnetism,” he says, “is a law of mind to the full extent of Faraday's idea; namely, that every mind has a new compass, a new north, a new direction of its own, differing in genius and aim from every other mind.” In chemistry, in botany, in physiology, in geology, in mechanics, he found keys to unlock his enigmas. No matter from what source the hint came, he was quick to take it. The stress and urge of expression with him was very great, and he would fuse and recast the most stubborn material. There is hardly a fundamental principle of science that he has not turned to ideal uses. “The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state super-induces the opposite.” “The systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love,” and so on. In “spiritual laws” he gives a happy turn to the law of gravitation:

“Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe it falls. When the fruit is dispatched, the leaf falls. The circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking of man and all animals is a falling forward. All our manual labor and works of strength, as prying, splitting, digging, rowing, and so forth, are done by dint of continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon, comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever.”

He is an evolutionist, not upon actual proof like Darwin, but upon poetic insight. “Man,” he says, “carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody before it was actually verified.” Thus that stupendous result of modern experimental science, that heat is only a mode of motion, was long before (in 1844) a fact in Emerson's idealism. “A little heat, that is a little motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white and deadly poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measure and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew nothing rightly for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote flora, fauna, ceres and pomonas to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive, and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must come assurely as the atom has two sides.”

Indeed most of Emerson's writings, including his poems, seem curiously to imply science, as if he had all these bold deductions and discoveries under his feet, and was determined to match them in the ideal. He has taken courage from her revelations. He would show another side to nature equally wonderful. Such men as Tyndall confess their obligation to him. His optics, his electricity, his spectrum analysis, his chemical affinity, his perpetual forces, his dynamics, his litmus tests, his germs in the air, etc., are more wonderful than theirs. How much he makes of circles, of polarity, of attraction and repulsion, of natural selection, of

                              “the famous might that lurks
In reaction and recoil,
Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil.”

He is the astronomer and philosopher of the moral sentiment. He is full of the surprises and paradoxes, the subtle relations and affinities, the great in the little, the far in the near, the sublime in the mean, that science has disclosed in the world about us. He would find a more powerful fulminant than has yet been discovered. He likes to see two harmless elements come together with a concussion that will shake the roof. It is not so much for material that Emerson is indebted to science, as for courage, example, inspiration.

When he used scientific material he fertilized it with his own spirit. This the true poet will always do when he goes to this field. Hard pan will not grow corn; meteoric dust will not nourish melons. The poet adds something to the hard facts of science that is like vegetable mold to the soil, like the contributions of animal and vegetable life, and of the rains, the dews, the snows.

Carlyle's debt to science is much less obvious than that of Emerson. He was not the intellectual miser, the gleaner and hoarder of ideas for their own sake, that Emerson was, but the prophet and spokesman of personal qualities, the creator and celebrator of heroes. So far as science ignored or belittled man, or the ethical quality in man, and rests with a mere mechanical conception of the universe, he was its enemy. Individuality alone interested him. Not the descent of the species, but the ascent of personal attributes, was the problem that attracted him. He was unfriendly to the doctrine of physical evolution, yet his conception of natural selection and the survival of the fittest as applied to history, is as radical as Darwin's. He had studied astronomy to some purpose. The fragment left among his papers called “Spiritual Optics,” and published by Froude in his life of him, shows what a profound interpretation and application he had given to the cardinal astronomical facts. His sense of the reign of law, his commanding perception of the justice and rectitude inherent in things, of the reality of the ideal, of the subordination of the lesser to the greater, the tyranny of mass, power, etc., have evidently all been deepened and intensified by his absorption of the main principles of this department of physical science. What disturbed him especially was any appearance of chaos, anarchy, insubordination; he wanted to see men governed and duly obedient to the stronger force, as if the orbs of heaven were his standard. He seemed always to see man and human life in their sidereal relations, against a background of immensity, depth beyond depth, terror beyond terror, splendor above splendor, surrounding them. Indeed, without the light thrown upon the universe by the revelations of astronomy, Carlyle would probably never have broken from the Calvinistic creed of his fathers. By a kind of sure instinct he spurned all that phase of science which results in such an interpretation of the universe as is embodied in the works of Spencer—works which, whatever their value, are so utterly barren to the literary and artistic mind.

The inquisitions of science, the vivisections, the violent, tortuous, disrupting processes are not always profitable. Wherein nature answers the easiest, cheerfulest, directest, we find our deepest interest; where science just anti pates the natural sense, as it were, or shows itself a little quicker witted than our slow faculties, as in the discovery of the circulation of the blood. The real wonder is that mankind should not always have known and believed it, because circulation is the law of nature. Everything circulates, or finally comes back to its starting point. Stagnation is death. The sphericity of the earth, too—how could we ever believe anything else? Does not the whole system of things center into balls; every form in nature strive to be spherical? The sphere is the infinity of form, that in which all specific form is merged and lost, or into which it escapes or gets transformed. The doctrine of the correlation and conservation of forces is pointed to by the laws of the mind. The poets have always said it, and all men have felt it: why await scientific proof? The spectroscope has revealed the universality of chemistry, that the farthermost star, as compared with our earth, is bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. This is a poetic truth as well as a scientific, and is valuable to all men, because the germ of it always lay in their minds. It is a comfort to know for a certainty that these elements are cosmic; that matter is the same, and spirit, or law, the same everywhere, and that if we were to visit the remotest worlds, we would not find the men rooted to the ground and the trees walking about, but life on the same terms as here. The main facts of natural history also lie in the main direction of our natural faculties, and are proper and welcome to all men. So much of botany, so much of biology, so much of geology, of chemistry, of natural philosophy, as lies within the sphere of legitimate observation, or within the plane of man's natural knowledge, is capable of being absorbed by literature, and heightened to new significance.