he sympathy of succeeding generations of mankind. The _Divina
Commedia_ and _Paradise Lost_ have conferred upon modern mythology a
systematic form; and when change and time shall have added one more
superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon
the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the
religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it
will have been stamped with the eternity of genius.

Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the
second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and
intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of
the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it:
developing itself in correspondence with their development. For
Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the
sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius,
had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all
that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their
notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan,
Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of
epic truth. Milton was the third epic poet. For if the title of epic
in its highest sense be refused to the _Aeneid_, still less can it be
conceded to the _Orlando Furioso_, the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, the
_Lusiad_, or the _Faerie Queene_.

Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion
of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their poetry probably
in the same proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed worship
of modern Europe. The one preceded and the other followed the
Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dante was the first religious
reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and
acrimony, than in the boldness of his censures of papal usurpation.
Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a
language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of
inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of those great spirits
who presided over the resurrection of learning; the Lucifer of that
starry flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from
republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted
world. His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a
burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in
the ashes