w magnificently Homer speaks of the higher
powers: 'As far as a man seeth with his eyes into the haze of
distance as he sitteth upon a cliff of outlook and gazeth over
the wine-dark sea, even so far at a bound leap the neighing
horses of the Gods.'

'He makes' [says Longinus] 'the vastness of the world the
measure of their leap.' Then, after a criticism of the Battle of
the Gods (too long to be quoted here) he goes on:

Much superior to the passages respecting the Battle of the
Gods are those which represent the divine nature as it really
is--pure and great and undefiled; for example, what is said of
Poseidon.

Her far-stretching ridges, her forest-trees, quaked in dismay,
And her peaks, and the Trojans' town, and the ships of Achaia's
array,
Beneath his immortal feet, as onward Poseidon strode.
Then over the surges he drave: leapt, sporting before the God,
Sea-beasts that uprose all round from the depths, for their king
they knew,
And for rapture the sea was disparted, and onward the car-steeds
flew[1].

Then how does Longinus conclude? Why, very strangely--very
strangely indeed, whether you take the treatise to be by that
Longinus, the Rhetorician and Zenobia's adviser, whom the Emperor
Aurelian put to death, or prefer to believe it the work of an
unknown hand in the first century. The treatise goes on:

Similarly, the legislator of the Jews [Moses], no ordinary
man, having formed and expressed a worthy conception of
the might of the Godhead, writes at the very beginning of his
Laws, 'God said'--What? 'Let there be light, and there was
light'

IV

So here, Gentlemen, you have Plato, Aristotle, Longinus--all
Greeks of separate states--men of eminence all three, and two of
surpassing eminence, all three and each in his time and turn
treating Homer reverently as Holy Writ and yet enjoying it
liberally as poetry. For indeed the true Greek mind had no
thought to separate poetry from religion, as to the true Greek
mind reverence and liberty to enjoy, with the liberty of mind
that helps to enjoy, were all tributes to the same divine thing.
They had no professionals, no puritans, to hedge it off with a
_taboo_: and so when the last and least of the three, Longinus,
comes to _our_ Holy Writ--the sublime poetry in which Christendom
reads its God--his open mind at once recognises it as poetry and
as sublime. 'God said, Let there be light: and there was light.'
If Longinus coul