copied into the imaginations of men, become as
generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is foreign to
the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced by these systems:
except that we protest, on the ground of the principles already
established, that no portion of it can be attributed to the poetry
they contain.

It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and
Isaiah, had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his
disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers
of this extraordinary person, are all instinct with the most vivid
poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a
certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions founded
upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which Plato had
distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and
became the object of the worship of the civilized world. Here it is to
be confessed that 'Light seems to thicken', and

The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
And night's black agents to their preys do rouse.

But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of
this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing
itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its
yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen to the music,
unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind,
nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.

The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and
institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived
the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and
victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and
opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to
the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations.
Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the
extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of
despotism and superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to be here
discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will had
become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of
the will of others; lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud,
characterized a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of
_creating_ in form, language,