m an exuberance of animal
spirits: we see them before us, their number, and their order of battle,
poured out upon the plain, "all plumed like estriches, like eagles newly
bathed, wanton as goats, wild as young bulls, youthful as May, and
gorgeous as the sun at midsummer," covered with glittering armour, with
dust and blood; while the Gods quaff their nectar in golden cups, or
mingle in the fray; and the old men assembled on the walls of Troy rise up
with reverence as Helen passes by them. The multitude of things in Homer
is wonderful; their splendour, their truth, their force, and variety. His
poetry is, like his religion, the poetry of number and form: he describes
the bodies as well as the souls of men.

The poetry of the Bible is that of imagination and of faith: it is
abstract and disembodied: it is not the poetry of form, but of power; not
of multitude, but of immensity, it does not divide into many, but
aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God. It is
not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems alone in
the world with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the
sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in
a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs the
universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from humanity, and a
scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense as it became
more universal, for the Infinite is present to every thing: "If we fly
into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we turn to the
east or the west, we cannot escape from it." Man is thus aggrandised in
the image of his Maker. The history of the patriarchs is of this kind;
they are founders of the chosen race of people, the inheritors of the
earth; they exist in the generations which are to come after them. Their
poetry, like their religious creed, is vast, unformed, obscure, and
infinite; a vision is upon it--an invisible hand is suspended over it. The
spirit of the Christian religion consists in the glory hereafter to be
revealed; but in the Hebrew dispensation, Providence took an immediate
share in the affairs of this life. Jacob's dream arose out of this
intimate communion between heaven and earth: it was this that let down, in
the sight of the youthful patriarch, a golden ladder from the sky to the
earth, with angels ascending and descending upon it, and shed a light upon
the lonely place, which can