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 a 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 never pass
away. The story of Ruth, again, is as if all the depth of natural
affection in the human race was involved in her breast. There are
descriptions in the book of Job more prodigal of imagery, more intense
in passion, than any thing in Homer, as that of the state of his
prosperity, and of the vision that came upon him by night. The metaphors
in the Old Testament are more boldly figurative. Things were collected
more into masses, and gave a greater _momentum_ to the imagination.

Dante was the father of