William Rowan Hamilton and William Wordsworth: the poetry of Science.

Brown, Daniel

LOOKING BACK TO HIS YOUTH, WILLIAM ROWAN HAMILTON WROTE IN 1847 to his friend and fellow astronomer, mathematician, and poet John Herschel that "it would really seem to have been at one time a toss-up, whether I should turn out a rhymer or an analyst [i.e., a mathematician]." (1) Hamilton elaborates upon his twin propensities for poetry and science in the early part of his poem "The Enthusiast," which he wrote in 1826 when he was twenty-one. Describing his unrequited love for Catherine Disney, a young woman he had met through the novelist Maria Edgeworth and her family in August 1824, Hamilton quarantines the meditative autobiographical preoccupations of his opening lines from confessional intimacy by casting them in the third-person:

 He was a young Enthusiast. He would gaze
 For hours upon the face of the night-heaven,
 To watch the silent stars, or the bright moon
 Moving in her unearthly loveliness
 And dream of worlds of bliss for pure souls hid
 In their far orbs. At other times he loved
 To listen to the mountain torrents roar,
 To look on Nature in her many forms,
 And sympathise with all: to hold sweet converse
 In secret with the genius of the stream,
 The fountain or the forest, and to pour
 His rapture forth in some fond gush of song;
 For the bright gift of Poetry was his;
 And in lone walks and sweetly pensive musings
 He would create new worlds and people them
 With fond hearts and sweet sounds and sights of Beauty.
 He had been gifted, too, with sterner powers.
 Even while a child he laid his daring hand
 On Science' golden key; and ere the tastes
 Or sports of boyhood yet had passed away
 Oft would he hold communion with the mind
 Of Newton, and with awed enthusiasm learn
 The Eternal Laws which bind the Universe,
 And which the stars obey.

 (Graves 1:183)

The year after he wrote "The Enthusiast," while still an undergraduate, Hamilton was made the Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College, Dublin, a position that included with it the title of Astronomer Royal for Ireland and the directorship of the Dunsink Observatory, where he would live. There is, however, little evidence of such a precocious professional capacity for astronomy in the opening lines of his poem, where the persona's gaze somewhat solipsistically meets "the face of the night-heaven," and its "far orbs" are seen to accommodate mythic or oneiric possibilities. Terrestrial nature is similarly anthropomorphized: in "converse" with a "genius of the stream" or "[t]he fountain," the speaker answers them in poetry and indeed in kind, with hydrodynamic force, "pour[ing] / His rapture forth in some fond gush of song." This "bright gift of poetry," inspired here by the experience of wild nature and "lone walks and sweetly pensive musings," is matched by another gift, the "sterner powers" of science that are identified with a precocious Promethean daring and a "communion with the mind / Of Newton," the genius of scientific reason who furnishes a counterpart to the poetic, pantheistic, "genius of the stream." The earlier description of the night sky as accommodating the poet's reverie, allowing him to "dream of worlds of bliss for pure souls hid / In their far orbs," is at the end of the extract complemented by a scientific apprehension of it, bound by "Eternal Laws."

Hamilton's science finds its place in "The Enthusiast" amongst a catalogue of romantic stances, which are in turn presented in the third person, as phenomena to be considered with a measure of scientific detachment. Such early poems display his enthusiasm for poetry and science as complementary modes of appreciating the richness of phenomena and the interpretations they can accommodate. This is most clearly demonstrated in his favorite early poem, "Ode to the Moon under Total Eclipse" (1823), which addresses the question of what the eclipse "means" not only with a scientific explanation--the Earth's "shadowy cone / ... / Hath darkly crossed thine orb on high"--but also by preserving alongside it a range of mythological and classical commentaries on the phenomenon. Hamilton proposes, for instance, a "wizard from his murky cell, / Who bows thee [i.e., the moon] to his power," and "ancient tales of terror" that see the eclipse as foretelling terrestrial natural disasters and omens of defeat in classical Greek battles. "I unite," he writes to his sister Eliza in a letter on an earlier eclipse, "in some degree the poet with the astronomer" (Graves 1:145-46; 127).

It was, however, not as an astronomer but as a mathematician that Hamilton made his greatest contributions to science, principally through his discovery in 1843 of quaternion operators, which enable the rotation of objects to be described mathematically. "The quaternion," he writes in 1855, was "born, as a curious offspring of a quaternion of parents, say of geometry, algebra, metaphysics, and poetry." Glossing quaternions as an algebra of four dimensions, consisting of the three of space and the fourth of time, he goes on to declare that he formulated his best account of them in his 1846 poem "The Tetractys":

 I have never been able to give a clearer statement of their nature
 and their aim than I have done in two lines of a sonnet addressed
 to Sir John Herschel:

 'And how the one of Time, of Space the Three,
 Might in the Chain of Symbols girdled be.' (2)

These brief but representative extracts from his later writings show how poetry became integral but subordinate to Hamilton's science. This shift from his early position, in which he regarded the two activities equitably but separately, so that it seemed to him "a toss-up, whether I should turn out a rhymer or an analyst," can be traced through his friendship with William Wordsworth, who encouraged him to question and clarify his ideas about poetry and science.

The twenty-two year old Hamilton first met Wordsworth during a visit to the Lake District in 1827, three months after becoming Andrews Professor. On the fifteenth of September, having been introduced to Hamilton and his traveling companions on the previous night, Wordsworth had them to afternoon tea at his home at Rydal Mount, after which the poet walked with his guests for a mile toward their hotel at Ambleside. Hamilton became so engrossed in conversation with Wordsworth during this walk that he accompanied him back to his house, an enthusiasm that was evidently shared as the two made a further excursion to Ambleside, "a midnight walk together for a long, long time," then to the house again before he finally returned to his hotel (Graves 1:262). On the following day Hamilton wrote a letter to his sister describing his meeting with Wordsworth and the "burning thoughts and words" that drew the two together as fast friends. He included with the letter "a copy of verses I picked up at Ambleside," "It Haunts Me Yet," another of the poems he wrote about his love for Disney. It is an index of the confidences they shared and a measure of the intimacy they established on their walks together that Hamilton also sent a copy to Wordsworth. Hamilton's first biographer and close friend Robert Perceval Graves, who also became a good friend of the romantic poet (and with his support the curate of Windermere parish), records that "more than once" he heard Wordsworth "refer in terms of pleasurable reminiscence to the midnight walk in which the two oscillated between Rydal and Ambleside, absorbed in converse on high themes, and finding it almost impossible to part" (Graves I:260). Hamilton became Wordsworth's "poetic disciple," (3) sending and addressing many poems to him, while the eminent poet, who was then fifty-seven, compared his new friend to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, describing them to Graves as "the two most wonderful men, taking all their endowments together, that he had ever met" (1:269).

Hamilton's friendship with Wordsworth, and indeed the parity he gave to his practices of poetry and science in the 1820s, emblematizes a transitional period in British culture, as poetry, beginning its gradual decline in power and prestige with the waning of romanticism, meets with ascendant science. One of the earliest of the romantic poets, Wordsworth also outlived his canonical peers, surviving well into the Victorian period as an original poet-seer in an increasingly scientistic age. He represents a confident romantic ideology that sees poetry and the poet to have a unique access to truth, and with it, great cultural and social authority, an epistemological efficacy that as the century progressed would largely come to be monopolized by professional science. His discussions with Hamilton in the late 1820s and early 1830s dramatize the subtle and entwined relations that existed between science and poetry at a time when British science was on the verge of defining itself professionally, and so formally distancing itself from literature and philosophy.

A national body dedicated to the purpose of professionalizing science, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), was formed at York in 1831. Although Hamilton was not at this first provisional meeting, he was soon after appointed to the BAAS Sub-committee for the Promotion of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and subsequently attended the annual meetings as one of the Association's original "Gentlemen of Science." While the push for the BAAS, led by the Scots natural philosopher Sir David Brewster, made common cause with literature and the arts, and the precedent of regarding literature as integral to moral and natural philosophy was embraced by many provincial scientific societies, (4) the first meeting chose not to include the arts within its ambit, an exclusion that effectively institutionalizes the separation of poetry and science at the inception of British professional science. Nonetheless, early efforts to clarify and fix the amorphous principle of science that prevailed at the time necessarily made appeals to a broad range of interested parties, including Coleridge, who, as the Cambridge polymath William Whewell records, played a decisive role in defining the new scientific professional at the 1833 meeting of the British Association:

 There was no general term by which these gentlemen could describe
 themselves with reference to their pursuits. Philosophers was felt
 to be too wide and too lofty a term, and was very properly
 forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer
 and metaphysician. (5)

Coleridge was, as Trevor H. Levere observes, anxious to distinguish philosophers from "those who merely studied the material world," (6) a generic designation that is in effect caricatured by such further suggestions from the meeting as "nature-poker" and "nature-peeper." Whewell is credited with coining the successful term "scientist," arriving at it by "analogy with artist." (7) Hamilton, who had by this time met and become friends with both Coleridge and Whewell, would have found the discussion compelling. He may also have taken the opportunity here to promote his more encompassing romantic vision of science, as he had on other such occasions, by arguing that metaphysics be included amongst the Sections of the BAAS, a suggestion that was however dismissed as "merely ideal." (8) The following paper traces the development of this vision and its correlative practice of science through Hamilton's historically telling debates with Wordsworth over the relations between poetry and science.

Graves writes, somewhat apologetically, that Hamilton sent his poem "It Haunts Me Yet" to Wordsworth while it was "fresh from his heart, and before time had been allowed for calm review and correction, to invite the sympathy, but at the same time to meet the criticism, of Wordsworth" (Graves 1:266). His new correspondent's reaction to the poem focuses upon the following lines:

 All reverently though I deem of thee,
 Though scarce of earth the homage that I pay,
 Forgive, if 'mid this fond idolatry
 A voice of human sympathy find way;
 And whisper that while Truth's and Science' ray
 With such serene effulgence o'er thee shone,
 There yet were moments when thy mortal day
 Was dark with clouds by secret sorrow thrown,
 Some lingering dream of youth--some lost beloved one.

 (Graves 1:265)

While the passage belongs to a section of the poem that is, as W. K. Thomas and Warren U. Ober observe, directly addressed to Hamilton's scientific hero Isaac Newton, (9) it is also, as Hankins argues, suggestive of the young astronomer-poet's recent meeting with Wordsworth. (10) Indeed Hankins reads the poem as a record of his subject's early conversations with Wordsworth, an interpretation that is consistent with his sending a copy to the romantic poet and another with the letter to his sister Eliza describing their meeting. Having climbed Helvellyn in mist and cloud during the morning, Hamilton spent the first day he walked with Wordsworth open to the elements, a context that he extends figuratively in his poem. He describes himself and the addressee of his poem as sharing the same weather intellectually and emotionally, both being similarly subject to the rays of Truth and the dark clouds of "secret sorrow." While the poem's lines on lost love are applicable to Newton, they appear also, as Thomas and Ober note, to have summoned Wordsworth's memories of his early love for Annette Vallon, for the older poet writes of his being affected by them "even to the dimming of my eye, and faltering of my voice while I was reading them aloud." (11)

Wordsworth is, however, clear-eyed in his reading of the lines discussing science: "'Truth's and Science' ray,' for the ray of Truth and Science, is not only extremely harsh, but a 'ray shone' is, if not absolutely a pleonasm, a great awkwardness; a 'ray fell' or 'shot' may be said, and a sun, or a moon, or a candle shone, but not a ray." This observation opens Wordsworth's sustained campaign of criticizing Hamilton's verse, the main theme of which is summed up by the charge he makes in his letter that "the workmanship (what else could be expected from so young a writer?) is not what it ought to be" (Graves 1:267). Furthermore, as the focus of his first criticisms of Hamilton's verse, these lines also disclose a tension Wordsworth sees between the practices of science and poetry, which prompts him to push his friend to make a choice between the two, although not in favor of poetry:

You send me showers of verses, which I receive with much pleasure, as do we all; yet have we fears that this employment may seduce you from the path of Science which you seem destined to tread with so much honour to yourself and profit to others. Again and again I must repeat, that the composition of verse is infinitely more of an art than men are prepared to believe, and absolute success in it depends upon innumerable minutiae, which it grieves me you should stoop to acquire a knowledge of. (Graves 1:491-92)

Throughout his discussions of Hamilton's verse Wordsworth stresses the need for what is effectively a professional commitment to poetry, which he assumes that "the path of Science" also requires. He differs from his young friend in regarding these pursuits as competing rather than complementary activities.

While the verses that Wordsworth contributed to Lyrical Ballads (1798) are distinguished by their invigorating naturalism, he was wary of scientific applications of this quality. He had a complex and ambivalent attitude to science, which was in part warranted by its changing nature during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as positivist and naturalistic tendencies increasingly worked to extricate it from its traditional synonym of philosophy. Wordsworth refers happily to the latter generic idea of science in the 1802 "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads, where he declares that

 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 join with him, rejoices in the presence
 of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the
 breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned
 expression which is in the countenance of all Science. (12)

Having little need of poetry as an articulating and expressive principle of pneuma, the materialist and analytical practices that would come to largely define the new professional science are attacked in one of the poems from the Lyrical Ballads, "The Tables Turned," as the vivisecting "meddling intellect [that] / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things," (13) a tendency to dissect and deform that suggests both the experimentalism of positivist science and the morphological and taxonomical distinctions it exacts upon organic phenomena. The Prelude (1805) similarly describes a scientific reason as "that false secondary power, by which, / In weakness, we create distinctions, then / Deem that our puny boundaries are things" (2:221-23). Wordsworth's criticism of such analytical approaches to nature, as producing wilfully disconnected knowledge, is made more elaborately in Book 4 of The Excursion:

 ... go, demand
 Of mighty Nature, if 'twas ever meant
 That we should pry far off yet be unraised;
 That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore,
 Viewing all objects unremittingly
 In disconnexion dead and spiritless;
 And still dividing, and dividing still,
 Break down all grandeur, still unsatisfied
 With the perverse attempt, while littleness
 May yet become more little; waging thus
 An impious warfare with the very life
 Of our own souls!

 (957-68)

Wordsworth may have bristled at the equation that Hamilton's poem makes in describing "Truth's and Science' ray." It is not only notable that his first criticisms of Hamilton's poetry should focus upon the lines on science in "It Haunts Me Yet," but remarkable that he corrects, or indeed should have to correct, the Professor of Astronomy and Irish Astronomer Royal's descriptions of radiant light: "a 'ray fell' or 'shot' may be said, and a sun, or a moon, or a candle shone, but not a ray." Correspondingly Hamilton may have been surprised by the romantic poet's insistence in his letter that "the logical faculty has infinitely more to do with poetry than the young and inexperienced, whether writer or critic, ever dreams of." While Wordsworth condemns analytical approaches to nature with his well-known dictum from "The Tables Turned," "We murder to dissect," he doesn't hesitate to adopt such an approach to his friend's poetry. In his letter to Hamilton he writes that when they next meet, "I will beg permission to dissect these verses" (Graves 1:267). He finds Hamilton's poetry lacking in analysis and concreteness, qualities that he might expect to find, and on occasion condemn, in the work of a practicing scientist.

As Wordsworth may have recognized with the association he makes in his mind between Hamilton and Coleridge, the idealism of their thought and poetry gives them a marked affinity with one another. Some comments that Wordsworth and Hamilton each make about Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner sketch a pattern of allegiances and differences in their respective principles of poetic diction and metaphysics. Commenting in a letter to his publisher Joseph Cottle in r799 on the place of Coleridge's poem in the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth considers that "[it] has upon the whole been an injury to the volume, I mean that the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on." (14) He criticizes the Rime for its distance from ordinary experience and idioms, while Hamilton, discussing the poem with his sisters thirty years later, argues that it offers a "truth of feeling I considered to be the highest truth of poetical composition." That truth is most effectively conveyed when it is unmixed with the merely factual, "the observance of that inferior kind [of truth] which consists in outward probability--the truth of circumstances and incidents," the stuff of "[n]ovels and ordinary poetic fiction." Hamilton sides with Coleridge in disliking their mutual friend's propensity for exacting attention to concrete details and diction, writing in 1832 that "Wordsworth interests and pleases me more and more, though I still dislike what Coleridge calls his matter-of-factness in description, such as 'Spade with which Wilkinson,' &c" (Graves 1:345; 601). Nor does Hamilton follow such positivist observances in his scientific work. "My tastes," he writes to his friend Dr. Robinson in 1831, "as you know, are decidedly mathematical rather than physical, and I dislike observing; which circumstances makes me rather unfit for holding an Observatory" (Graves 1:431). His close friend Aubrey De Vere recalls that "The Royal Astronomer did not look through his telescopes more than once or twice a year!" (15) Furthermore, he takes an intuitionist approach to mathematics, which he develops in the 1830S through his theory of algebra as "the science of pure time" and confirms through his reading of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. (16) Hamilton prefers the conceptual to the empirical work of the astronomer, and his poetry similarly accords with the abstract nature of his mathematical thought and the metaphysical idealism he developed through Coleridge, "from whose writings," he informs Wordsworth after first meeting the latter's old friend in 1832, "I consider myself to have derived so much of impulse and instruction" (Graves 1:552).

2

In August 1829 Wordsworth came to visit Hamilton in Ireland, where he stayed with him and his sisters at the Observatory. The two men's differing ideas on the relations between poetry and science, a tension that is aired rather than directly addressed in their early correspondence, became the focus of intense discussions at this time, leading Hamilton to abandon his ambitions to be a poet soon after his friend returned to England. In the memoir she made of the visit, Eliza Hamilton recalls coming down for dinner one evening with her sisters to find "Wordsworth already there, and reading something to William, who sat by him listening intently.... It was his own 'Excursion' he was reading, in consequence of a discussion having arisen between them, in which William had alluded to a passage in that poem which, as well as I could collect, did not quite please him by its slight reverence for Science" (Graves 1:312). Eliza does not identify the passage, although she does describe the seer-like style of the reading: "Wordsworth first finished the passage, in a very low, impressive tone, moving his finger under every line as he went along, and seeming as he read to be quite rapt out of this world." The reading was followed by his argument:

He then defended himself, with a beautiful mixture of warmth and temperateness, from the accusation of any want of reverence for Science, in the proper sense of the word--Science, that raised the mind to the contemplation of God in works, and which was pursued with that end as its primary and great object; but as for all other science, all science which put this end out of view, all science which was a bare collection of facts for their own sake, or to be applied merely to the material uses of life, he thought it degraded instead of raising the species. All science which waged war with and wished to extinguish Imagination in the mind of man, and to leave it nothing of any kind but the naked knowledge of facts, was, he thought, much worse than useless; and what is disseminated in the present day under the title of 'useful knowledge,' being disconnected, as he thought it, with God and everything but itself, was of a dangerous and debasing tendency. For his part, rather than have his mind engrossed with this kind of science, to the utter exclusion of Imagination, and of every consideration but what refers to our bodily comforts, power and greatness, he would much prefer being a superstitious old woman. (Graves 1:313)

This account of Wordsworth's ideas on contemporary science echoes the latter parts of Book 4 of The Excursion, not only with respect to science's disconnection and exploitation, but also with respect to the superiority of paganism and superstition. In particular Wordsworth's Observatory comments recall a passage on Scotland that affirms "superstitious rites" (903) against "the sober powers / Of science, and philosophy, and sense!" (917-18). The lines that Wordsworth read aloud and defended, and that so exercised Hamilton, most likely centered upon the following extract. Indeed Hankins states categorically that the two "held long debates over this portion of the Excursion," (17) which looks forward to a chastened science no longer enslaved to factual detail and rationalism but rather working harmoniously with the imagination:

 Science then
 Shall be a precious visitant; and then,
 And only then, be worthy of her name:
 For then her heart shall kindle; her dull eye,
 Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang
 Chained to its object in brute slavery;
 But taught with patient interest to watch
 The processes of things, and serve the cause
 Of order and distinctness, not for this
 Shall it forget that its most noble use,
 Its most illustrious province, must be found
 In furnishing clear guidance, a support
 Not treacherous, to the mind's excursive power.

 (The Excursion, 4: 1251-63)

Wordsworth grants that science could be admitted to the realm of poetry and the imagination, but only on a strictly temporary, probationary and subordinate basis. Science, for which "truth" is declared in the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads to be "a remote and unknown benefactor," is depicted here as foreign to poetry, "a precious visitant from an alien world, like a Caliban that can be freed from its enslavement to materialism, tutored and refined to join for a time Ariel and Prospero's realm.

Hamilton draws from his earlier discussions with Wordsworth the thesis for his 1831 Introductory Lecture on Astronomy at Trinity College, as he discourses upon "the latent imagination that is involved in the processes of Science." Indeed he cites the lines from The Excursion on Science the "precious visitant," beginning his lecture with his own recital and recommendation of this passage, "in which," he tells his students, the poet "expresses his conception of the advantages to our moral being that may be derived from Science when studied in a proper spirit" (Graves 1:500-501). Although he finds this a useful propaedeutic for his new students, Hamilton does not regard it as a complete and balanced characterization of Science.

In their discussions at the Observatory, Hamilton replied to the lengthy arguments Wordsworth made for the Imagination, and for a science that is subservient to it, by protesting that, as Eliza records, "still he thought the Intellectual faculties held equal rank at least with the Imaginative" (Graves 1:314). While his 183 t Introductory Lecture advocates the imagination as a foundational principle for science, it goes on to argue for the primarily ideal nature of scientific discovery; that rather than an imaginative engagement with the experience of nature, as Wordsworth suggests, the reveries of science (and art) be allowed to take leave of the empirical and dwell, at least initially, in the ideal realm of the mind. Hamilton's lecture presents Newton as the exemplar of this principle:

Then Newton came; he felt that power not less than beauty was an object of intellect, that the unity of law, as well as that of form, could make the Infinite, One; he framed therefore a universe of energies; or rather, as the mind of an artist calls up many forms, he meditated on many laws and caused many ideal worlds to pass before him: and when he chose the law that bears his name, he seems to have been half determined by its mathematical simplicity, and consequent intellectual beauty, and only half by its agreement with the phenomena already observed. While, therefore, I do not pretend that the Newtonian philosophy is likely to make men better painters, or sculptors, or poets, than if it never had been invented, I yet consider the structure of that philosophy as bearing much analogy to the productions of painting, sculpture, and poetry, and as being not less than they an intellectual and imaginative creation, having properly only an ideal truth, though charming partly by resemblance. The world which Newton constructed was like the outward world; but had it not been so, he might still have chosen to contemplate it. Yet surely he cannot be blamed, before the most ideal tribunal, for deriving an additional pleasure from the perception of the observed conformity between the work of his finite intellect and the Creation of the Eternal Mind; nor can his followers be blamed if, while they continue the task which he began of constructing an ideal world out of multitudinous but unified energies, they compare the growing edifice with the existing fabric of the universe, and study the proportions of this outward by the help of that inward frame. For imagined possibility affects us otherwise than believed reality: the interest of the has been, the is, and the will be, differs from that of the may and the might; and both these interests are combined in physical science in its perfection. (Graves 1:502-3)

Newton is conceived of here as akin to the autobiographical subject of "The Enthusiast": "He would create new worlds." Indeed Wordsworth appears to have refined Hamilton's characterization of Newton, who "caused many ideal worlds to pass before him," in The Prelude (1850), where he describes the great English physicist and mathematician as "a Mind for ever / Voyaging thro' strange seas of Thought, alone" (3:62-63).

Hamilton expresses a working idealist faith in what one of his successors, the English mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, refers to in 1869 as his "faculties of mental vision," his similar insistence that "actuality is not cancelled or balanced by privation [of empirical fact]." (18) Whereas Wordsworth declares at the Observatory in 1829 that Science could be justified accordingly as it "raised the mind to the contemplation of God in works," Hamilton's idealism passes beyond this natural theological exigency, seeing science and art as each able to express an "ideal truth" that need not be justified through a correspondent material manifestation. That there is for him "an additional pleasure from the perception of the observed conformity between the work of [Newton's] finite intellect and the Creation of the Eternal Mind" (my emphasis) suggests that the original purely ideal conceptions of the finite mind correspond by degrees to those of the divine mind, an echo of Coleridge's description of the secondary imagination "as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM" (19) of God's mind. Coleridge in fact discusses this principle at some length in an 1832 letter to Hamilton (Graves 1:546-47). The Promethean idea of a divine spark of mind, a consequence of man being made in God's image, calling into existence by fiat its own ideal counterparts to the Creation is put directly in Hamilton's early poem "To Eliza." While the poem is dedicated to describing the reveries of the poet, its persona modestly disavows this identity for himself and suggests that of the scientist, who with his abstract systems and theories can also "call ideal worlds to view, / His own creation bright and new" (Graves 1:168).

By untethering scientific truth from empirical referents Hamilton makes "the unity of law" in what he calls "Pure Science" analogous to "that of form" in art. The scientific principle of "power" that he champions here draws multeity to unity, just as he sees the forms of art to do also. Newton is construed as a romantic scientist who "could make the Infinite, One; he framed therefore a universe of energies." Hamilton's "power" instances the grand unifying principle of romantic philosophy and science, of the German Naturphilosophie and Coleridge's "one life within us and abroad," which would provide the prepossession for the energy concept, the key factor that offers to explain its simultaneous discovery by various research scientists working independently during the 1840s and early 1850s. (20)

The account in "The Enthusiast" of the poet's ideal capacity to "create new worlds" leads fluently into a discussion of the persona's analogous gift for science, again suggesting that both poetry and science spring from a purely a priori capacity of mind, rather than a Wordsworthian communion with external nature. The appeal of Newton for Hamilton comes from "the structure of that philosophy as bearing much analogy to the productions of painting, sculpture, and poetry," a structure that is determined decisively on the a priori criteria of "mathematical simplicity, and consequent intellectual beauty." It is apprehended and appreciated formally in relation to our mental machinery, as we "study the proportions of this outward by the help of that inward flame." This suggests the concord of the faculties of the imagination and the understanding that Kant describes in his aesthetic doctrine of "free" beauty, where the unifying principle of law or regularity demanded by the understanding coincides with the freedom of play required by the imagination. The result of this is, as Kant puts it, a "proportionate accord" or "harmony of the cognitive faculties" that produces an aesthetic "feeling of pleasure." (21) Insofar as they can have validity and beauty for the mind without corresponding to material reality, the "ideal worlds" Hamilton finds created by science and art are an a priori matter of taste, like the abstract proportions and patterns that Kant discusses in his Critique of Judgment.

Hamilton's advocacy of a broadly Kantian characterization of mind is put concisely in a witty riposte he makes to John Locke's principle of the tabula rasa, which Graves records: "When asked whether he accepted, as expressing a truth, Locke's comparison of the state of the human mind at birth to a sheet of white paper, he said, 'Yes, but ruled paper': an answer pregnant with much of his philosophy" (Graves 3:237). He sees the mind as organizing its sensory intuitions in a Kantian fashion along synthetic a priori channels. More radically, Hamilton understands the activity of mathematics in the Kantian manner not as the mere analysis of concepts but as their construction in pure intuition: "The mathematics of space is," Kant writes, "based upon th[e] successive synthesis of the productive imagination in the generation of figures." (22) In a letter to Wordsworth from October 1831 Hamilton records that he received a copy of the Critique of Pure Reason, possibly from the poet's son (and Hamilton's godchild), who is also called William and was studying in Germany at the time. Hamilton had, however, apparently translated little more than the introductory chapters by the following summer, when he lost the book on a bus in Birmingham. (23) From their first meeting in March 1832 Coleridge urged Hamilton to read Kant, and sent him various texts by the philosopher, including his own copies of the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment in 1833 (Graves 1:454, 2:96, 100, 103-5,363-64; 3:116-17). Hamilton writes to his student Lord Adare in 1834 that "on the whole, a large part of my pleasure consists in recognizing through Kant's works, opinions, or rather views, which have been long familiar to myself," his prior familiarity with such ideas having come, as Hankins argues, from his early reading of Coleridge. (24)

The analogy that Hamilton makes of science to art in his 1831 Introductory Lecture is offered conversely in his defense of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as he appreciates what Wordsworth calls "the strangeness of [the poem]" through his principle that "imagined possibility affects us otherwise than believed reality":

I maintained that ... there was a special advantage resulting from the experimental knowledge which we derive by putting ourselves in thought under remote and even supernatural circumstances, and observing how we feel, or how we believe that we should be affected. It appeared to me that, as in science, mathematical or physical, we have often come to understand better the near by aiming at the remote; so, in the study of our own minds and feelings, we might improve our practical knowledge by not confining ourselves thereto; might come to know better how we should feel and act under real circumstances, by sometimes placing ourselves in such as cannot be realised. (Graves 1:346)

Hamilton justifies Coleridge's poem in terms that anticipate what the physicist James Clerk Maxwell would famously describe in his Theory of Heat (1871) as a "thought experiment," an a priori means of exploring phenomena that are not accessible to us empirically. Writing at a time when molecules were still submicroscopic, Maxwell hypothesizes that some warmer molecules within a cold compartment of a gas could pass through an aperture mediated by a "valve," a hypothetical agent that his fellow physicist William Thomson called "Maxwell's Demon," to a chamber of warm molecules, in apparent contravention of the second law of thermodynamics, which asserts that all energy in the form of heat moves to distribute itself evenly throughout space. This demonstrates that the second law is not the strict invariant principle that its title suggests but a statistical principle. As the appellation Thomson gives to it indicates, Maxwell's heuristic principle effectively extends to the imaginary extreme of the supernatural, which, as Hamilton observes, Coleridge's poem also demands its readers engage with. While this exercise in reading verse is seen to facilitate truths about our subjective nature, Hamilton presents it as analogous to the "mathematical or physical" sciences as they similarly move through ideal realms of "imagined possibility." Hamilton finds his principles of scientific knowledge in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which proceeds, like his practices of astronomy and mathematics, from a focus upon "the remote" and the transcendental, a perspective that discourages sensory observation and correspondingly facilitates intellectual speculation.

Coleridge defines science in Aids to Reflection as "any chain of truths which are either absolutely certain, or necessarily true for the human mind, from the laws and constitution of the mind itself." Hankins considers this the most important of the ideas that the philosopher-poet transmitted to Hamilton, who similarly defines Science as "strict, pure, and independent; deduced by valid reasonings from its own intuitive principles." (25) In an 1825 letter to Arabella Lawrence, a friend of Coleridge's he knew through Maria Edgeworth, Hamilton quotes a section of "To Eliza" that includes the lines cited earlier on "call[ing] ideal worlds to view," declaring that Science "sits enthroned in its sphere of isolated intellect, undisturbed by passion, unclouded by doubt." This idea leads him to suppose the existence of a race of pure scientists who have no need of experience: "And I have thought that, in the infinity of Creation, there may be an order of beings of pure and passionless intellect, to whom Science in all its fullness of beauty is unveiled, and to whom our noblest discoveries appear but as the elements of knowledge" (Graves 1:194).

3

It is perhaps not surprising, given the analogies he makes between poetry and science, that in finally relinquishing his poetic vocation to focus upon his scientific work in October 1829, Hamilton should do so in verse. In "To Poetry" he refers nostalgically to an original Platonic or prelapsarian unity of poetry and science, the "joint abode" of the "Spirit of Beauty" and her "sister Truth," but must advise the former that "my life be now / Bound to thy sister Truth by solemn vow" (Graves 1:317). Like many of his poems, "To Poetry" is addressed to one of Hamilton's muses, who is recognized here, with Science, as both mistress and sister. He sent a copy of it to Wordsworth, who, perhaps concerned by the performative contradiction of this parting gesture, reminds Hamilton of his abiding criticism of his "workmanship," the ground for his argument that his correspondent should choose between science and poetry: "Where there is so much sincerity of feeling in a matter so dignified as the renunciation of Poetry for Science, one feels that an apology is necessary for verbal criticism. I will therefore content myself with observing that joying for joy or joyance is not to my taste--indeed I object to such liberties upon principle" (Graves 1:351). Despite Wordsworth's argument that a dual commitment to poetry and science can only compromise the development of his capacity for each, Hamilton justifies his continued cultivation of poetry as an adjunct to his professional scientific work: "Although you consider those lines as containing a renunciation of poetry for science," he writes in reply to his friend's letter, "you feel, I am sure, that it is only the outward form which I can be contented to resign, and not the inward influence" (Graves 1:354). The apparently oxymoronic gesture of "To Poetry" indicates that his discussions with Wordsworth at the Observatory yielded not simply a resolve to renounce poetry but a clarified understanding of its uses for his science.

Hamilton also gave a copy of his poem to Francis Edgeworth, the stepbrother of the novelist, and on October 31 responded to his friend's criticisms of it "with some remarks, not as a defence of my verses, but as an explanation of my opinions." Edgeworth had evidently asked Hamilton how his poem could "separate Truth and Beauty," and he identifies the "two sisters" that they correspond to in the poem, Science and Poetry, with "the faculties of Reason and Imagination, such as they are defined by Coleridge." Hamilton, however, describes them rather as "two views of Nature [that] have a mysterious and intimate connexion ... but they do not seem to be identical with each other, and I think that we may correctly say of the scientific and [of] the poetical man, that, while each contemplates both Truth and Beauty, yet the former habitually looks at things, or thoughts, rather as true than as beautiful; the latter as beautiful rather than as true" (Graves 1:346; 347).

While Hamilton represents Science in his 1825 letter to Lawrence as presiding ascetically over "its sphere of isolated intellect," as if within the confines of the individual mind, rounded by its skull, he depicts Poetry as a sociable complement to it: "man is not a creature of intellect alone." Indeed, he maintains, "[h]is heart is even more important than his mind; he was made to be a social creature, and his second duty is to love man. Now I think that poetry is eminently qualified to strengthen and refine the links which bind man to his kind" (Graves 1:194). This accords with the distinction that Wordsworth makes between the "solitude" in which "the Man of science seeks truth" and "the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him." He sees science as "a personal and individual acquisition ... by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings." (26) Hamilton's affirmation of poetry is also illustrated by his verses, which are often prompted by, or addressed to, people he felt close to, such as Disney, his sister Eliza, Herschel, and Wordsworth. Tempered by his idealism, however, Poetry assumes a curiously a priori sociability in the opening stanza of "To Poetry":

 Spirit of Beauty and of tender joying,
 Who goest forth deformity destroying,
 And making of the earth on which we stand
 A glad elysium and a fairy-land;
 Thou who keepest festival
 In the mind's ideal hall,
 Where, as the servants of thy regal state,
 The forms of all things grand or lovely wait!

 (Graves 1:317)

Consistent with the preoccupations of the astronomer and the mathematician, Hamilton envisages the mind here as a space, one that can, as was observed earlier, accommodate "ideal worlds." Science's "sphere of isolated intellect" presumably occupies this space, which in "To Poetry" furnishes the venue, the "ideal hall," for Poetry's "festival." The intuitionist assumptions that ground Hamilton's mathematics entail that such creative thought occurs as articulations of the mind's a priori form of space. While this is figured sociably in the case of poetry as a "festival" within the "ideal hall," Hamilton describes "Pure Science," the construction of concepts themselves, more radically by analogy with the artificially shaped spaces of architecture. He uses such structural tropes of fabrication in his reply to Edgeworth's letter, where they introduce the thesis he will elaborate in his 1831 Introductory Lecture: "Even the 'Principia' of Newton, which is ordinarily perused as a model of inductive philosophy, I consider as being rather a work, a fabric, an architectural edifice, the external results of which have been and will be changed by the progress of experimental science, but which will always be interesting to mathematicians as a structure of beautiful thoughts" (Graves 1:348). Indeed these remarks date from within a few weeks after Hamilton's discussion of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which was earlier seen to state reciprocally the thesis about science and art he elaborates in 1831.

Introduced as an active idealist principle that transforms the commonsensical "earth on which we stand" into "A glad elysium and a fairy-land," Poetry's "festival" suggests Shakespearean conceits of the poetic imagination. "The forms of all things grand or lovely wait," poised between passivity and activity, retained by the mind for Poetry to deploy them in its masque-like entertainments. The context of the poem's production and reception suggests that these "forms" are platonic in nature, beautiful counterparts to the truthful principles of number and geometrical form that Hamilton, talking with Wordsworth at the Observatory, attributes to his hypothetical race of pure scientists:

he told Wordsworth that he believed Mathematics to be a connecting link between men and beings of a higher nature; the circle and triangle he believed to have a real existence in their minds and in the nature of things, and not to be a mere creation or arbitrary symbol proceeding from human invention.

Wordsworth smiled kindly, but said that reminded him of the Platonic doctrine of the internal existence in the marble of those beautiful forms from which the sculptor was supposed only to withdraw the veil. (Graves 1:314)

In his draft reply to Edgeworth's reading of "To Poetry," written on the last day of the month in which the poem was composed, Hamilton describes Platonism by analogy not with sculpture but with his set of architectural terms, as akin to Newton's science: "Yet the Newtonian, no less than the Platonic, Philosophy appears to me to be a work, a fabric, an architectural edifice" (Graves 1:350), The generic categories of "a work" and "a fabric," and the more specific confluence of the sciences and arts required to produce "an architectural edifice," license and anticipate the analogy between the objects of science and art that will be developed in the 1831 Introductory Lecture.

Probably transposing Hamilton's experiences of Irish country house entertainments, the "festival" that Poetry makes "In the mind's ideal hall" can be understood as a reception. It is a formal social occasion that furnishes an epistemological metaphor, as the mind receives its guests, sensible emissaries from the object world, and delegates its "servants" to cater to them and articulate the festivities. Insofar as it is envisaged hierarchically as a "regal state," within which its "forms" organize its grand tributes and feasts in "the mind's ideal hall," the dominion of Poetry suggests a carnivalesque counterpart to the bureaucratic Kantian faculty psychology, in which sense intuitions are regulated through the various administrative tiers of the Forms of Sense, the Imagination, and the Categories of the Understanding. A quality of mind that is exercised not only in its writing and reading, but fundamentally in the expansive experiences of nature that Hamilton refers to in such poems as "The Enthusiast," Poetry is identified in the opening lines of "To Poetry" with a delicate aesthetic pleasure and the maintenance of proportionate relations: "Spirit of Beauty and of tender joying, / Who goest forth deformity destroying." The "festival" that Poetry installs "In the mind's ideal hall" offers an allegory for a state of aesthetic apprehension reminiscent of the dynamic Kantian "free" beauty that was discerned earlier in the account Hamilton gives in his Introductory Lecture of the "world which Newton constructed." Hamilton's poem is addressed directly to its muse, who embodies not so much the practice of versifying that he is ostensibly taking leave of, but rather a "Spirit of Beauty," an ethos that he wishes to retain for the professional science he pledges himself to here. "To Poetry" celebrates this "Spirit" through the pleasurable interactions it facilitates between different parties within the mind, the sociable sustenance of the festival.

As he puts it in a passage from "To Eliza" that he cites to justify his poetry to Lawrence, Hamilton wishes to keep "a portion of the poet's bliss" (Graves 1:195). Having outlined in its opening stanza the fulfilling state of dynamic equilibrium that Poetry brings to the mind as it "keepest festival," the remainder of Hamilton's invocation "To Poetry" pleads with it not to desert him:

 O, linger near me! though thou may'st disdain
 By my ineloquent lips to breathe thy strain;
 Thy minister altho' I may not be,
 To win the wild world by sweet minstrelsy:
 Yet from my own, my inmost soul,
 Thy chariot, Spirit, do not roll,
 Nor leave those chambers dark and desolate
 Where long ago thy glorious presence sate!

 (Graves 1:316)

The poet is imaged here, with a quibble on minstrelsy and ministry that recalls their shared etymology, not as the ministering angel to Poetry, but on the contrary, as requesting that its aureole enlighten the gothic recesses of his mind.

Akin to the "Spirit of Beauty," the persona's "inmost soul" is identified with a chariot, a characterization that recalls Plato's allegory of the soul in the Phaedrus. According to this myth, each of the gods has a pair of divine white horses to lead their chariot, whereas men have only one such horse, their other, black, horse being unkempt and ill-disciplined, a figure for lust and base motives. (27) Hamilton is concerned only with this corollary to the black horse, namely that mortals can have only one white horse leading the chariots of their souls toward a vision of the Ideas. Accepting that his chariot cannot be led by both Science and Poetry, Hamilton accordingly allocates the "Spirit of Beauty" to a distinct chariot, which he hopes will nonetheless accompany and guide his chariot, and not "roll" away from this vehicle for "Science." Hamilton's allegory corresponds to his account of his walks with Wordsworth in "Farewell Verses to William Wordsworth: At the Close of a Visit to Rydal Mount in 1830," which also recalls the Biblical Elijah, who was delivered to heaven in a chariot: "Or whether soared we, as these walks we trod, / From Beauty and from Science up to God" (Graves 1:369).

Having described Poetry and Science as siblings in the first quatrain of the final stanza of "To Poetry," the last lines of the poem name their shared origin and ultimate purpose, their "joint abode, / The home and birthplace, by the throne of God!," gathered together to sing His praises. Science, which in Hamilton's earlier description "sits enthroned in its sphere of isolated intellect," occupies a "dark and desolate" mental space without Poetry, "thy glorious presence [that] sate" alongside it. Each are imaged as platonic echoes of the divine, the enthroned God, a correlation that suggests the relationship Coleridge specifies between the creative power of the secondary imagination and that of the deity, the "eternal I AM," cited earlier.

A year after arguing that "the Intellectual faculties held equal rank at least with the Imaginative," Hamilton makes a conciliatory gesture to Wordsworth with his "Farewell Verses," where he explains further the rationale behind such persistent poetry writing. The earlier extract comes from the following passage, which recognizes in the imagination a remedy for desiccating intellectual abstraction and idealism:

 Nor shall the commune soon forgotten be,
 Here in that sacred presence held with thee: Whether
 my joy was heightened and refined
 By impress of thy meditative mind,
 Which, long to Beauty and to Nature vowed,
 Not less could hear their still voice than their loud;
 Or I, who love to tread the sister-fane,
 Where Science worships with her solemn train,
 Would tell how also there from little things
 To the purged eye a sight of wonder springs;
 Or whether soared we, as these walks we trod,
 From Beauty and from Science up to God.
 And in the midnight or the lonely hour
 Oft shall these thoughts put forth a sudden power,
 With a too bright remembrance startling me,
 And bidding all my custom'd musings flee.
 Then shall the shadowy abstractions fade,
 And give me back the valley, lake or glade: Or
 I shall gaze again, with raptured eye,
 On those ethereal hills, that evening sky.

 (Graves 1:369)

Wordsworth is depicted as having made his vow to Beauty and Nature, while Hamilton worships at "the sister lane" of Science or Truth. Having clarified his relationship to these siblings in "To Poetry" he ventures forth with Wordsworth on a chaste double date with them in the "Farewell Verses."

In introducing this poem and the summer visit to Wordsworth it commemorates, Graves describes "the habit which Hamilton had of carrying about with him, wherever he went, a cargo of books: he must have, we shall see, his Pontecoulant, his Wordsworth and his Coleridge, on his trip to the Lakes" (1:368). He does indeed appear to have kept his Wordsworth close to him while writing the "Farewell Verses." The poem's reference to "the purged eye" would seem to acknowledge and accept the critique of science in The Excursion, as, in accordance with Wordsworth's prescriptive prophecy ("her dull eye / ... no more shall hang / Chained to its object in brute slavery"), Science's eye is evidently purged of positivist and materialist dullness. Rather than diminishing nature, as Wordsworth accuses science of doing in The Excursion, so that "littleness / May yet become more little," here, on the contrary, "from little things / To the purged eye a sight of wonder springs." Hamilton's image also suggests the liberation of the eye from the domineering "reasoning power," which a few lines earlier in Book 4 of Wordsworth's poem "Made the eye blind."

While Hamilton considers it necessary to defend the reason and the understanding to Wordsworth, he also, as his 1831 Introductory Lecture demonstrates, feels the need conversely to assert the value of the imagination in his scientific work and lectures, as he finds this quality wanting in his peers. He writes to Adare in 1831 that a recent visit from the Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy, caused him to experience "as much dislike to Science as it was possible in my nature to entertain," it having arisen, he writes, "from no dislike to him, but only from the repulsion of my character to his, produced by his utter unimaginativeness" (Graves 1:459). Much as in his poems he is given to aligning himself and Wordsworth allegorically with principles of "Science" and "Beauty," each being identified with a function in the manner of a mathematical equation, he sees himself and Airy to embody directly contrasting principles within science.

In his "Farewell Verses" Hamilton emphasizes the capacity of the imagination, of a poetic reverie, to refresh and renew what he discriminates in his discussions with Wordsworth as "the Intellectual faculties," as he anticipates that the "sudden power" of imagination will allow him "in the midnight or the lonely hour" of his scientific work to vividly recall "the commune" of his walks with Wordsworth. Indeed, "with a too bright remembrance startling me" such vivid memories are seen to strike like lightning to purify the mind of thoughts that have calcified into "customed musings" or been deracinated into "shadowy abstractions." Accordingly as these "shadowy abstractions fade" through the "startling" light of the imagination, the poet can "gaze again, with raptured eye." Hamilton's perspective anticipates that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who writes of the ornithologist that "the want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary," and comments more broadly, that "all our science lacks a human side." (28) The poet-scientist's "commune" with Wordsworth is, through their walks together, originally and literally sociable, but it is also for him abiding and imaginational, reminiscent of the oddly abstract sociability described in "To Poetry." Believing that all such forms of "commune" can supplement and enrich science, Hamilton sees the BAAS to have its raison d'etre in encouraging such sociability. He argues in his address as Secretary to the 1835 meeting in Dublin that this constitutes the great contribution that the Association makes to furthering the ultimately solitary pursuit of scientific discovery: "if it be inquired how ... we as a Body hope to forward Science, the answer briefly is: that this great thing is to be done by us through the agency of the social spirit--we meet, we speak, we feel together now, that we may afterwards the better think, and act, and feel alone" (Graves 2:15 I).

Hamilton met with Airy again when he visited Cambridge with Adare in April 1832. While in Cambridge he also socialized with Mrs. Somerville, who is best known for her popular books on mathematics and astronomy, and wrote to his cousin Arthur that he found the place "so gay that Airy, who hates ladies' parties, complains that we shall have gone away with quite a false and unjust notion of the University" (Graves 1:553). Consistent with the earlier accusation against him of "utter unimaginativeness," Airy is seen to reject the sociability that Hamilton identifies with a sympathetic capacity to "commune" with a larger world, a breadth of spirit integral to poetry and beneficial to science. Here, as elsewhere, Hamilton associates this quality with women, while Airy's repudiation of it suggests the specialist and masculinist nature of the new professional science that was gathering pace and definition at the time.

In contrast to the disdain of "ladies' parties" that he notes of Airy, the young Hamilton habitually conflates his science with women, figuring it allegorically as a chaste mistress in such poems as "To Poetry" and some of his letters, and including expositions of it in his poems dedicated to Disney, "The Enthusiast" and "It Haunts Me Yet." Hamilton's early education excluded both women and a dedicated science curriculum: indeed it encouraged him to think of science as an illicit passion. Like most men who became scientists in the early to mid-Victorian period, Hamilton received a predominantly classical education, albeit a rather more demanding and idiosyncratic one than was usual. From infancy until the age of seventeen he was taught classical, oriental, and modern European languages by his uncle James, who raised him and ran the diocesan school at Trim. Apart from Euclid and some algebra, any interest Hamilton had in science was regarded as marginal to his education, a distraction, which he accordingly describes in a letter to Arthur, written while preparing for the entrance examinations for Trinity College, Dublin, as a temptation that leads to infatuation: "The time I have given to Science has been very small indeed; for I fear becoming again infatuated with it, and prefer giving my leisure even to less valuable reading, if it can be connected in any way with Classical literature" (Graves 1:141). In his 1825 letter to Lawrence, Hamilton describes what he sees as both the excesses and deficiencies of science, an unwieldy passion and the unimaginative dryness that he elaborates upon later in his "Farewell Verses" and in describing Airy. He defends his literary interest in the classics, and his own poetry writing, as a precaution against these extremes:

But it is the very passionateness of my love for Science which makes me fear its unlimited indulgence. I would preserve some other taste, some rival principle; I would cherish the fondness for classical and for elegant literature which was early infused into me by the uncle to whom I owe my education--not in the vain hope of eminence, not in the idle affectation of universal genius, but to expand and liberalise my mind, to multiply and vary its resources, to guard not against the name but against the reality of being a mere mathematician. (Graves 1:193)

Science is here both the chaste, or even dryly pedantic, principle that requires the softening and enlivening influence of its sibling "Beauty," and the overweening passion that requires the discipline of classical forms. Hamilton writes to Adare after Airy's visit to the Observatory that the "return of respect and regard for astronomy" came to him through his enthusiasm for "the imaginative character of Miss [Ellen] De Vere," his most recent love interest. While Science may suggest a supremely aloof mistress as "it sits enthroned in its sphere of isolated intellect," its starkness is seen to be softened and warmed through Hamilton's relationship with De Vere, by a principle of sympathetic imagination: "I can sympathise with a mind like hers, and thus throw around the austere nakedness of the science the robe of human interest" (Graves 1:459). Statuesque and sublime in its cold autonomy, or as he suggests in the "Farewell Verses" and his comments on Airy, liable to become dull and denuded through its habitual or perfunctory professional practice, Science needs, Hamilton believes, to be enhanced by poetic reverie, qualities of imaginative communion and human warmth.

Bibliography

Brush, Stephen. The Temperature of History. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. Edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

--. Poetical Works. Edited by J. C. C. Mays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Conduct of Life. London: Smith, Elder, 1860.

Graves, Robert Perceval. Life of William Rowan Hamilton. 3 vols. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1885-89.

Hankins, Thomas L. Sir William Rowan Hamilton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

--. "Algebra as Pure Time: William Rowan Hamilton and the Foundations of Algebra." In Motion and Time, Space and Matter: Interrelations in the History and Philosophy of Science, eds. Robert Turnbull and Peter Machamer, 327-59. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976.

--. "Triplets and Triads: Sir William Rowan Hamilton on the Metaphysics of Mathematics." Isis 68, no. 2 (June, 1977): 174-93.

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--. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1929.

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-- and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1787-1805: Early Years. Second edition. Edited by Ernest D. Selincourt; Revised by Chester L. Shaver. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

DANIEL BROWN

University of Southampton, UK

(1.) Robert Perceval Graves, Life of William Rowan Hamilton, 3 vols. (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1885), 2:591. Hereafter cited in the text as Graves, followed by volume and page.

(2.) Trinity College MS notebook 1492-116, 14-15, cited in Thomas L. Hankins, "Triplets and Triads: Sir William Rowan Hamilton on the Metaphysics of Mathematics," Isis 68, no. 2 (June, 1977): 176.

(3.) Thomas L. Hankins, Sir William Rowan Hamilton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 50.

(4.) O.J. R. Howarth, The British Association for the Advancement of Science: A Retrospect 1831- 1931, 2nd ed. (London: BAAS, 1931), 5; Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 276.

(5.) William Whewell, "On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. By Mrs Somerville," The Quarterly Review 2, no. 101 (1834): 59.

(6.) Levere, "Coleridge and the Sciences," in Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds., Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 296.

(7.) Whewell, "On the Connexion," 59-60.

(8.) Cited in Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science, 277.

(9.) Thomas and Ober, A Mind For Ever Voyaging: Wordsworth at Work Portraying Newton and Science (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1989), 120.

(10.) Sir William Rowan Hamilton, 51.

(11.) A Mind For Ever Voyaging, 267.

(12.) Lyrical Ballads, 4th ed. (London: Longman, 1805), xxxvi-vii.

(13.) "The Tables Turned," lines 26-28, in William Wordsworth: The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), vol. 1:357. All subsequent references to Wordsworth's poems, except for The Prelude are from this edition and occur parenthetically in the text. Citations to The Prelude are from The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979).

(14.) The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1787-1805: Early Years, 2nd ed., ed. Ernest D. Selincourt; rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 264.

(15.) De Vere, Recollections of Aubrey De Vere (London: Edward Arnold, 1897), 47.

(16.) See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), A 22-30/B 37-46; A 713-36/B 741-64. See Thomas L. Hankins, "Algebra as Pure Time: William Rowan Hamilton and the Foundations of Algebra," in Motion and Time, Space and Matter: Interrelations in the History and Philosophy of Science, ed. Robert Turnbull and Peter Machamer (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2976), 327-59.

(17.) Hankins, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, 103.

(18.) Sylvester, The Laws of Verse or Principles of Versification Exemplified in Metrical Translations Laws (London: Longmans, 1870), 114.

(19.) Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1:304.

(20.) Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp," line 26, from Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). On romanticism and the energy concept, see Thomas Kuhn, "Energy Conservation as Simultaneous Discovery," Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 338; L. Pearce Williams, Faraday: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 62-72; Stephen Brush, The Temperature of History (New York: Burt Franklin, 1978), 29.

(21.) Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 242; 219; 218; 221.

(22.) Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 163/B 204.

(23.) Hankins, "Triplets," 183.

(24.) Hankins, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, 260.

(25.) Hankins, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, 386.

(26.) Wordsworth, "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, xxxvii.

(27.) Plato, Phaedrus, 246a-254e, The Dialogues of Plato, Translated into English by Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871), 1:541-616.

(28.) Emerson, The Conduct of Life (London: Smith, Elder, 1860), 175.