ical age." For our parts, we know not
what age has not been poetical--in what age have not existed all the
elements of poetry, been developed all its passions, and been heard many
of its tones. "Were the dark ages poetical?" it will be asked. Yes, for
then, as now, there was pathos--there was passion--there were hatred,
revenge, love, grief, despair, religion. Wherever there is the fear of
death and of judgment, there is, and must be poetry--and when was that
feeling more intensely developed than during that dim period? The
victims of a spell are objects of poetical interest. Here was a strong
spell, embracing a world. Was no arm during the dark ages bared aloft in
defense of outraged innocence? Or was no head then covered with the
snows of a hundred winters, through one midnight despair? Was the voice
of prayer then stifled throughout Europe's hundred lands? Was the mighty
heart of man--the throbbing of which is just poetry, then utterly
silent? But it was not expressed! We maintain, on the contrary, that it
was--expressed at the time, in part by monks, and scalds, and orators,
and expressed afterward in the glad energy of the spring which human
nature made from its trance, into new life and motion. The elements of
poetry had been accumulating in secret. The renovation of letters merely
opened a passage for what had been struggling for vent. What is Dante's
work but a beautiful incarnation of the spirit of the Middle Ages? His
passion is that of a sublimated Inquisitor. His "Inferno" is such a
dream as might have been dreamed by a poet monk, whose body had been
macerated by austerities, and whose spirit had been darkened by long
broodings on the fate of the victims of perdition. It is the poetical
part of the passion of those ages of darkness finding a full voice--an
eternal echo. And it was not in vain that so deep had been the slumber,
when such had been its visions. There is a grandeur about any passion
when carried to excess. Superstition, therefore, became the inspiration
of one of the greatest productions of the universe. Dante was needed
precisely when he appeared. The precise quantity of poetical material to
answer the ends of a great original poet was accumulated; and the mighty
Florentine, when he rose, became the mouth-piece and oracle of his age
and of its cognate ages past--the exact index of all that redeemed,
animated, excited, or adorned them.

The crusades, too, were another proof that the slumber in wh