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 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