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Explosive factories are veritable schools of efficiency. All work is done under the eye of the most vigilant caution, and the penalty for negligence is so expensive in the destruction of life and property that science, which is knowledge, and proceeds from sure premises to safe conclusions, is the sole guide. It does not do to follow a guess. The dynamite factory is no place for that class of persons who believe themselves to be favorites of Providence or of Almighty God, for dynamite plays no favorites.

There is probably no other class of persons so little guided by science as are the poets. They pride themselves on the fact that they ignore science. They claim that poetry is a sort of transcendental stuff, star-dusted from the gods’ abode upon only a few persons fortunate enough to be born with a divine afflatus, which puts them into a fine frenzy—a condition of body and mind partaking somewhat of the ecstaticism of the Whirling Dervish, the spiritual clairvoyant and the soothsayer—a holy hysteria—a delirium-tremendous effervescence of over-soul—in which condition they are able actually to commandeer the co-operation of the Deity.

To heighten the humbug, the poets claim, to quote, that “poetry knows no law,” that “it is above and beyond all law”; and consequently that it is “the antithesis of science,” veritably “the despair of science,” “defying all attempts at analysis and understanding,” and that, being an inspired product, “poetry is the greatest achievement of the human mind.”

The poets would have us believe that all of the great inventors and discoverers, scientists and philosophers, have been far inferior to the poets. The poets would have us believe that all the triumphs of chemistry and mechanics have been small compared with the triumphs of poetry. The poets would have us believe that the invention of the phonograph, of the telephone, of wireless telegraphy, the discovery of radium and the X-ray, the discovery of gravitation, are not equal to such triumphs of the poets as “Aurora Leigh,” “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight,” and “The May Queen.”

The poets would have us believe that the discovery of the spectroscope, which tells the composition of the stars so far away that the light by which we see them now left its source before the building of Babylon and the founding of the Egyptian Pyramids, is a less wonderful product of the human mind than is Shelley’s “Skylark.”

It is perfectly safe for the poets to live and move and have their being in error, but it does not do even for a poet, when working with explosive materials, to eliminate scientific procedure, for in that case he is likely to get an uplift that will sprinkle the feet of the angels with his filamented fragments.

This very thing actually once happened in the Pennsylvania oil region when the poet laureate of his community was blessed by the discovery of petroleum on his otherwise worthless farm. One well sunk by the oil company gushed a large quantity of both oil and natural gas. The royalty received by the poet was immense. One day he conceived the idea of climbing to the top of the oil-derrick and writing a poem to vent his pent-up fervor.

He had engaged the services of a photographer to catch his beatitudinations. The sun was just descending the horizon, and the poet and the top of the derrick were still aglow in the radiance of sunset, while derrick and poet were enveloped in an explosive mixture of gas and air a hundred feet in diameter. The photographer had said, “Beady, look pleasant, please.” This was the moment of inspiration. The poet loosed his divine afflatus and set his fine frenzy to doing things. The following science-confounding doggerel is what he effused:—