ous
manner, but in the plainest and most severely earnest words.

Now, the highest representatives of men who have thus endeavored, during
the Christian era, to search out these deep things, and relate them, are
Dante and Milton. There are none who for earnestness of thought, for
mastery of word, can be classed with these. I am not at present, mind you,
speaking of persons set apart in any priestly or pastoral office, to
deliver creeds to us, or doctrines; but of men who try to discover and set
forth, as far as by human intellect is possible, the facts of the other
world. Divines may perhaps teach us how to arrive there, but only these
two poets have in any powerful manner striven to discover, or in any
definite words professed to tell, what we shall see and become there; or
how those upper and nether worlds are, and have been, inhabited.

And what have they told us? Milton's account of the most important event
in his whole system of the universe, the fall of the angels, is evidently
unbelievable to himself; and the more so, that it is wholly founded on,
and in a great part spoiled and degraded from, Hesiod's account of the
decisive war of the younger gods with the Titans. The rest of his poem is
a picturesque drama, in which every artifice of invention is visibly and
consciously employed; not a single fact being, for an instant, conceived
as tenable by any living faith.

Dante's conception is far more intense, and, by himself, for the time, not
to be escaped from; it is indeed a vision, but a vision only, and that one
of the wildest that ever entranced a soul--a dream in which every
grotesque type or fantasy of heathen tradition is renewed, and adorned;
and the destinies of the Christian Church, under their most sacred
symbols, become literally subordinate to the praise, and are only to be
understood by the aid, of one dear Florentine maiden.

I tell you truly that, as I strive more with this strange lethargy and
trance in myself, and awake to the meaning and power of life, it seems
daily more amazing to me that men such as these should dare to play with
the most precious truths (or the most deadly untruths) by which the whole
human race listening to them could be informed, or deceived--all the world
their audiences forever, with pleased ear, and passionate heart; and yet,
to this submissive infinitude of souls, and evermore succeeding and
succeeding multitude, hungry for bread of life, they do but play upon
sweetly