Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/69

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IMMORTAL BROTHERHOOD
39

Insight and spiritual feeling will continue to precede discovery and sensation. In their footprints the investigator must advance for his next truth, and at the moment of his advance become one with the poet. In the words of Tyndall on Emerson, "Poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes her grave brother by the hand, and cheers him with immortal laughter." Meanwhile the laws of change, Ebb and flow.fashion, ennui, that breed devotion first to one exercise of man's higher faculty, and anon to another, will direct the public attention alternately to the investigator and to the poet. In lulls or fatigue of discovery, there will be an eager return to the oracles for their interpretation of the omens of the laboratory and ward. The services of the temple are confined no more to the homily and narrative than to song and prayer.