such comparatively commonplace elements of wonder as yet preserve
from oblivion "The Castle of Otranto" and "The Old English Baron."

Now, to my mind, the true reason why a supernatural agency is
indispensable to the conception of the Epic, is that the Epic is the
highest and the completest form in which Art can express either Man or
Nature, and that without some gleams of the supernatural, Man is not
man nor Nature, nature.

It is said, by a writer to whom an eminent philosophical
critic justly applies the epithets of "pious and profound:" [5]

"Is it unreasonable to confess that we believe in God, not by reason
of the Nature which conceals Him, but by reason of the Supernatural
in Man which alone reveals and proves Him to exist?... Man reveals
God: for Man, by his intelligence, rises above Nature; and in virtue
of this intelligence is conscious of himself as a power not only
independent of, but opposed to, Nature, and capable of resisting,
conquering, and controlling her."[6]


If the meaning involved in the argument, of which I have here made
but scanty extracts, be carefully studied, I think that we shall find
deeper reasons than the critics who dictated canons of taste to the last
century discovered,--why the supernatural is indispensable to the Epic,
and why it is allowable to all works of imagination, in which Art looks
on Nature with Man's inner sense of a something beyond and above her.

But the Writer who, whether in verse or prose, would avail himself
of such sources of pity or terror as flow from the Marvellous, can