ne great
emotion? But he uses--as we see--the terms "lustre" and "decoration"--as
if poetry necessarily, by its very nature, was always ambitious and
ornate; whereas we all know, that it is often in all its glory direct
and simple as the language of very childhood, and for that reason
sublime.

With such false notions of poetry, it is not to be wondered at that Dr
Johnson, enlightened man as he was, should have concluded his argument
with this absurdity--"The ideas of Christian theology are too simple for
eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestic for ornament; to
recommend them by tropes and figures, is to magnify by a concave mirror
the sidereal hemisphere." No. Simple as they are--on them have been
bestowed, and by them awakened, the highest strains of eloquence--and
here we hail the shade of Jeremy Taylor alone--one of the highest that
ever soared from earth to heaven; sacred as they are, they have not been
desecrated by the fictions--so to call them--of John Milton; majestic as
are the heavens, their majesty has not been lowered by the ornaments
that the rich genius of the old English divines has so profusely hung
around them, like dewdrops glistening on the fruitage of the Tree of
Life. Tropes and figures are nowhere more numerous and refulgent than in
the Scriptures themselves, from Isaiah to St John; and, magnificent as
are the "sidereal heavens" when the eye looks aloft, they are not to our
eyes less so, nor less lovely, when reflected in the bosom of a still
lake or the slumbering ocean.

This statement of facts destroys at once all Dr Johnson's splendid
sophistry--splendid at first sight--but on closer inspection a mere
haze, mist, or smoke, illuminated by an artificial lustre. How far more
truly, and how far more sublimely, does Milton, "that mighty orb of
song," speak of his own divine gift--the gift of Poetry! "These
abilities are the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed, and are of
power to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and
public civility; to allay the perturbation of the mind, and set the
affections to a right tune; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the
throne and equipage of God's Almightiness, and what he suffers to be
wrought with high providence in his Church; to sing victorious agonies
of Martyrs and Saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious nations,
doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore
the general relapse of k