mind, as
to furnish occasion for surprise that the attempt has not hitherto been
made. As regards the end for which He descended, I have adhered to the
Christian tradition that it was to free the souls of the ancient saints
confined in the temporal paradise of the Under-world, embracing also in
my design the less general opinion, that it was to demonstrate His
universal supremacy by appearing among the damned.

"A source of additional human interest was suggested by the relation
which men, as a distinct order of beings, might be supposed to sustain
to demons in the place of their common doom, and under new conditions of
existence; such, I conceived, as would make it possible in some degree
to realize even the divine fictions of the Greek mythology, under the
forms and with the attributes accorded them by ancient religions, and by
the poetry of all time. This could not fail to suggest the further
conception of introducing the divinities of our forefathers, and of
other great families of mankind, thus bringing together in action and
contrast the deified men, or various representatives of an heroic
humanity, among different races: nor did it seem too great a stretch of
imaginative probability to conceive that their general characteristics
might be adopted and imitated by beings already invested by the human
mind with an indefinite power, and inhabiting a world in which the
wonderful becomes the probable.

"But it is, after all, the general purpose of exhibiting the triumph of
moral power over all physical and inferior spiritual force, in the
descent of Christ into hell, which gives my design the complex character
of a mythic, heroic, and Christian poem, and, at the same time,
constitutes the unity of its parts. The ancients, whose representative
types I introduce, knew and appreciated but two kinds of power, brute or
physical, and spiritual, including all occult and supernatural efficacy,
and strength of intellect and will. Virtue, triumphant by the aid of
adventitious force, or relying upon unconquerable pride and disdain to
resist it, was the highest reach of their dynamic conceptions. Moral
power is properly a Christian idea. It is not, therefore, without what I
conceive to be a true as well as a poetic apprehension of the design of
the Descent into Hell, that the heroes of profane, and the not fabulous
Titans of sacred antiquity, by their rivalries and contentions, brought
together in arms for a trial of their compar