of the first class, is a world-poem, a poem of depth
and height and breadth, narrating long-prepared ruin or foundation of
a race; and poetry, soaring beyond history, is bold to lay bare the
method of the divine intervention in the momentous work. The epic
poet, worthy of the lofty task, has such large sympathies, together
with such consciousness of power, that he takes on him to interpret
and incarnate the celestial cooperation. There are people, and some of
them even poets, whose consciousness is so smothered behind the
senses, that they come short of belief in spiritual potency. They are
what, with felicity of phrase, Mr. Matthew Arnold calls--

"Light half-believers in our casual creeds."

Homer and Milton were believers: they believed in the visible, active
presence on the earth of the god Mars, and the archangel Raphael. Had
they not, there would have been no "Iliad," no "Paradise Lost."

Dante, too, was a believer; and such warm, wide sympathies had he, and
an imagination so daring, that he undertook to unfold the divine
judgment on the multitudinous dead, ranging with inspired vision
through hell, and purgatory, and heaven. In his large, hot heart, he
lodged the racy, crude beliefs of his age, and with poetic pen wrought
them into immortal shapes. The then religious imaginations of
Christendom, positive, and gross, and very vivid; the politics of
Italy, then tumultuous and embittered; the theology and philosophy of
his time, fantastic, unfashioned--all this was his material. But all
this, and were it ten times as much, is but the skeleton, the frame.
The true material of a poem is the poet's own nature and thoughts, his
sentiment and his; judgment, his opinions, aspirations, imaginations,
his veriest self, the whole of him, especially the best of him.

Than imaginary journeys through the realms beyond the grave, which
were so much the vogue with the religious writers of the day,--and
literature then was chiefly, almost exclusively, religious,--no more
broad or tempting canvas could be offered to a poet, beset, as all
poets are apt to be, with the need of utterance, and possessed,
moreover, of a graphic genius that craved strong, glowing themes for
its play. The present teeming world to be transfigured into the world
to come, and the solicitation and temptation to do this brought to a
manly, powerful nature, passionate, creative, descriptive, to a
stirring realist, into whose breast, as a chief actor on the