Victorian poetry and sciencewrites in "The Golden Echo and the Leaden Echo" (composed 1882; GMH
33). Here he literalizes - makes physical - the Christian-idealist analogy of
spirit and breath that absorbs Wordsworth's, Tennyson's, and Browning's
attention. He collapses the abstract and the concrete: the idealist and
positivist understandings of "breath" that Wordsworth relies upon in
making his influential "contradistinction ... of Poetry and Matter of Fact,
or Science." 31
NOTES
1 William Wordsworth, "Preface" (1802) to Lyrical Ballads, in Wordsworth's
Literary Criticism, ed. W.J.B. Owen (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1974), 80-81.
2 John Tyndall, "Science and Spirits," Fragments of Science for Unscientific
People (London: Longmans, Green, 1871), 433-34.
3 See Tyndall, Fragments of Science for Unscientific People, 29-37, 38-68,
445-49.
4 William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics, Considered with Reference
to Natural Theology (London: William Pickering, 1833).
5 T.H. Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, ed. Leonard Huxley,
2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1900), II, 338, cited in D.R. Oldroyd, Darwinian
Impacts: An Introduction to the Darwinian Revolution, second edition (Ken-
sington, NSW: New South Wales University Press, 1983), 312.
6 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, 2 vols.
(London: Macmillan, 1897), I, 162.
7 Tennyson, "To Edward Moxon," 15 November 1844, in The Letters of Alfred
Lord Tennyson, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon Jr., 3 vols. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1981-90), I, 230.
8 See, for example, the following lines: X, 9; XIII, 15 ; XLII, 4; XLVII, 11; LV, 6;
LXIV, 17; LXVI, 14; LXVIII, 4; LXIX, 1; LXXXIX, 36 ; CXXIII, 10.
9 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London:
Oxford University Press, 1912), 456.
10 See Aristotle, De Anima, II. 4. 415823-4i5bi5 on the reproducible species
soul, and Nicomachean Ethics X. 7. iijjbz6-j8a8 on nous.
11 Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting
the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, 13th July 1798," in Lyrical Ballads and
Other Poems, ijyj-iyoo, ed. James Butler and Karen Green, The Cornell
Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 119.
12 Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, second edition, 3 vols. (London: John
Murray, 1832-33), II, 308. The map faces the first page. See Lyell's commentary
on the fold-out map (II, 304-10) and his discussion of chalk and the geology of
south-east England in III, 285-323.
13 M.W. Rowe, "Arnold and the Metaphysics of Science: A Note on 'Dover
Beach,'" Victorian Poetry 27 (1989), 216-17.
14 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer, World's Classics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 396.157