nture? Colonists passing in our day
to America or Australia might conceivably carry with them the seeds of
empires as considerable as Rome's. But they would go out thinking of
their private livelihood and convenience, breaking or loosening whatever
pious bonds might unite them to the past, and quite irresponsibly laying
the foundations for an unknown future. A poet, to raise them to the
height of their unwitting function, would have to endow them with second
sight and a corresponding breadth of soul and purpose. He would need, in
a word, heroic figures and supernatural machinery.

Now, what supernatural machinery and heroic figures do for an epic poet
piety does for a race. It endows it, through mythical and magic symbols,
with something like a vision or representation of its past and future.
Religion is normally the most traditional and national of things. It
embodies and localises the racial heritage. Commandments of the law,
feasts and fasts, temples and the tombs associated with them, are so
many foci of communal life, so many points for the dissemination of
custom. The Sabbath, which a critical age might justify on hygienic
grounds, is inconceivable without a religious sanction. The craving for
rest and emotion expressed itself spontaneously in a practice which, as
it established itself, had to be sanctioned by fables till the recurrent
holiday, with all its humane and chastening influences, came to be
established on supernatural authority. It was now piety to observe it
and to commemorate in it the sacred duties and traditions of the race.
In this function, of course, lay its true justification, but the
mythical one had to be assigned, since the diffused prosaic advantages
of such a practice would never avail to impose it on irrational wills.
Indeed, to revert to our illustration, had AEneas foreseen in detail the
whole history of Rome, would not his faith in his divine mission have
been considerably dashed? The reality, precious and inestimable as on
the whole it was to humanity, might well have shocked him by its
cruelties, shames, and disasters. He would have wished to found only a
perfect nation and a city eternal indeed. A want of rationality and
measure in the human will, that has not learned to prize small
betterments and finite but real goods, compels it to deceive itself
about the rewards of life in order to secure them. That celestial
mission, those heavenly apparitions, those incalculable treasures
carr