tion, honour, glory, happiness here and hereafter, or it
is nothing. Is the end of "Paradise Lost" to please? Is the end of
Dante's Divine Comedy to please? Is the end of the Psalms of David to
please? Or of the songs of Isaiah? Yet it is probable that poetry has
often been injured or vitiated by having been written in the spirit of
this creed. It relieved poets from the burden of their duty--from the
responsibility of their endowments--from the conscience that is in
genius. We suspect that this doctrine has borne especially hard on all
sacred poetry, disinclined poets to devoting their genius to it--and
consigned, if not to oblivion, to neglect, much of what is great in that
magnificent walk. For if the masters of the Holy Harp are to strike it
but to please--if their high inspirations are to be deadened and dragged
down by the prevalent power of such a mean and unworthy aim--they will
either be contented to awaken a few touching tones of "those strains
that once did sweet in Zion glide"--unwilling to prolong and deepen them
into the diapason of praise--or they will deposit their lyre within the
gloom of the sanctuary, and leave unawakened "the soul of music sleeping
on its strings."

All arguments, or rather objections to, sacred poetry, dissolve as you
internally look at them, like unabiding mist-shapes, or rather like
imagined mirage where no mirage is, but the mind itself makes ocular
deceptions for its own amusement. By sacred poetry is mostly meant
Scriptural; but there are, and always have been, conceited and callous
critics, who would exclude all religious feelings from poetry, and
indeed from prose too, compendiously calling them all cant. Had such
criticasters been right, all great nations would not have so gloried in
their great bards. Poetry, it is clear, embraces all we can experience;
and every high, impassioned, imaginative, intellectual, and moral state
of being becomes religious before it passes away, provided it be left
free to seek the empyrean, and not adstricted to the glebe by some
severe slavery of condition, which destroys the desire of ascent by the
same inexorable laws that palsy the power, and reconcile the toilers to
the doom of the dust. If all the states of being that poetry illustrates
do thus tend, of their own accord, towards religious elevation, all high
poetry must be religious; and so it is, for its whole language is
breathing of a life "above the smoke and stir of this dim spot which