theory which identifies the followers of Satan with
the gods of the heathen; and, in a tone of poetry almost unequalled,
even in his own splendid writings, he thus describes, in one of his
earlier pieces, the departure of these pretended deities on the eve of
the blessed Nativity:--

"The oracles are dumb,
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving;
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving;
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priests from the prophetic cell.

"The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale,
Edged with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-inwoven tresses torn,
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

"In consecrated earth,
And on the holy hearth,
The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint;
In urns and altars round,
A drear and dying sound
Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint;
And the chill marble seems to sweat,
While each peculiar Power foregoes his wonted seat.

"Peor and Baalim
Forsake their temples dim,
With that twice-battered god of Palestine;
And mooned Ashtaroth,
Heaven's queen and mother both,
Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine;
The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn;
In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.

"And sullen Moloch, fled,
Hath left in shadows dread
His burning idol all of darkest hue;
In vain with cymbals ring,
They call the grisly king,
In dismal dance about the furnace blue;
The brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis and Orus, and the Dog Anubis, haste."

The quotation is a long one, but it is scarcely possible to shorten what
is so beautiful and interesting a description of the heathen deities,
whether in the classic personifications of Greece, the horrible shapes
worshipped by mere barbarians, or the hieroglyphical enormities of the
Egyptian Mythology. The idea of identifying the pagan deities,
especially the most distinguished of them, with the manifestation of
demoniac power, and concluding that the descent of our Saviour struck
them with silence, so nobly expressed in the poetry of Milton, is not
certainly to be lightly rejected. It has been asserted, in simple prose,
by authorities of no mean weight; nor does there appear anything
inconsistent in the faith of th