The scene announced by the apparition of Hector—that is to say, the destruction of a great nation and the foundation of the Roman empire-would be much more magnificent than the fall of a single queen, if Joas, rekindling the torch of David, did not show us in the distance the coming of the Messiah and the reformation of all mankind.

The two poets exhibit the same excellence, though we prefer the passage in Racine. As Hector first appeared to Æneas, so he remained to the end; but the borrowed pomp of Jezabel, so suddenly contrasted with her gory and lacerated form, is a change of person which gives to Racine's verse a beauty not possessed by that of Virgil. The mother's ghost, also, bending over her daughter's bed, as if to conceal itself, and then all at once transformed into mangled bones and flesh, is one of those frightful circumstances which are characteristic of the phantom.

CHAPTER XII.

POETICAL MACHINERY, CONTINUED.

Journeys of Homer's gods-Satan's expedition in quest of the New Creation.

We now come to that part of poetic machinery which is derived from the journeys of supernatural beings. This is one of the departments of the marvellous in which Homer has displayed the greatest sublimity. Sometimes he tells you that the car of the god flies like the thought of a traveller, who calls to mind in a moment all the regions that he has visited; at others he says, "Far as a man seated on a rock on the brink of ocean can see around him, so far the immortal coursers sprang forward at every bound."

But, whatever may be the genius of Homer and the majesty of his gods, his marvellous and all his grandeur are nevertheless eclipsed by the marvellous of Christianity.

Satan, having reached the gates of hell, which are opened for him by sin and death, prepares to go in quest of the creation.1

The gates wide open stood,

And like a furnace mouth

Cast forth redounding smoke and ruddy flame.

Before their eyes in sudden view appear

The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark

Illimitable ocean, without bound,

Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height,

And time and place, are lost; where eldest Night

And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold

Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise

Of endless wars, and by confusion stand. ...

Into this wild abyss the wary fiend

Stood on the brink of hell, and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage, for no narrow frith

He had to cross. . . . .

At last his sail-broad vans

He spreads for flight, and, in the surging smoke

Uplifted, spurns the ground; thence many a league,
As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides

Audacious; but that seat soon failing, meets

A vast vacuity; all unawares,

Fluttering his pennons vain, plump down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour
Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance,
The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud,
Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him

As many miles aloft; that fury stayed
Quenched in a boggy syrtis, neither sea,

Nor good dry land; nigh foundered, on he fares,
Treading the crude consistence, half on foot,
Half flying.

The fiend

O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.
At length, a universal hubbub wild

Of stunning sounds and voices all confused,
Borne through the hollow dark, assaults his ear
With loudest vehemence; thither he plies,
Undaunted to meet there whatever power
Or spirit of the nethermost abyss

Might in that noise reside, of whom to ask

Which way the nearest coast of darkness lies

1 Paradise Lost, book ii. v. 888 to 1050; book iii. v. 501 to 544, with the omission of passages here and there.

Bordering on light, when straight behold the throne Of Chaos, and his dark pavilion spread

Wide on the wasteful deep; with him enthroned,

Sat sable-vested Night, eldest of things,

The consort of his reign; and by them stood
Rumor and Chance,

And Tumult and Confusion all embroiled,
And Discord with a thousand various mouths,
To whom Satan, turning boldly, thus: Ye Powers
And Spirits of this nethermost abyss,

Chaos, and ancient Night, I come no spy
With purpose to explore or to disturb

The secrets of your realm, but by constraint
Wandering this darksome desert, as my way
Lies through your spacious empire up to light-
Direct my course.

Thus Satan; and him thus the Anarch old,
With faltering speech and visage incomposed,
Answered: I know thee, stranger, who thou art;-

That mighty leading angel, who of late

Made head against heaven's King, though overthrown. I upon my frontiers here

Keep residence, . .

That little which is left so to defend,

Encroached on still through your intestine broils,
Weakening the sceptre of old Night; first hell,
Your dungeon stretching far and wide beneath;
Now lately heaven and earth, another world,
Hung o'er my realm, linked in a golden chain
To that side heaven from whence your legions fell.
. . Go and speed;

Havoc and spoil and ruin are my gain!

He ceased; and Satan stayed not to reply,

But, glad that now his sea should find a shore,
With fresh alacrity and force renewed,

Springs upward like a pyramid of fire
Into the wild expanse.

.....

But now at last the sacred influence

Of light appears, and from the walls of heaven
Shoots far into the bosom of dim night
A glimmering dawn; here nature first begins
Her farthest verge, and Chaos to retire-
That Satan with less toil, and now with ease,
Wafts on the calmer wave by dubious light,
And like a weather-beaten vessel holds
Gladly the port, . . .

Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold
Far off the empyreal heaven extended wide-
With opal towers and battlements adorned

Of living sapphire. . . . .

Far distant he descries,

Ascending, by degrees magnificent,

Up to the wall of heaven, a structure high-
Direct against which opened from beneath
A passage down to the earth.-

Satan from hence now on the lower stair,

That scaled by steps of gold to heaven gate,

Looks down with wonder at the sudden view

Of all this world at once.

In the opinion of any impartial person, a religion which has furnished such a sublime species of the marvellous, and moreover inspired the idea of the loves of Adam and Eve, cannot be an anti-poetical religion. What is Juno, repairing to the limits of the earth in Ethiopia, to Satan speeding his course from the depths of Chaos up to the frontiers of nature? The passages which we have omitted still heighten the effect; for they seem to protract the journey of the prince of darkness, and convey to the reader a vague conception of the infinite space through which he has passed.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE CHRISTIAN HELL.

AMONG the many differences which distinguish the Christian hell from the Tartarus of the ancients, one in particular is well worthy of remark;-that is, the torments which the devils themselves undergo. Pluto, the Judges, the Fates, the Furies, shared not the tortures of the guilty. The pangs of our infernal spirits are therefore an additional field for the imagination, and consequently a poetical advantage which our hell possesses over that of antiquity.

In the Cimmerian plains of the Odyssey, the indistinctness of the place, the darkness, the incongruity of the objects, the ditch where the shades assemble to quaff blood, give to the picture something awful, and that perhaps bears a nearer resemblance to the Christian hell than the Tænarus of Virgil. In the latter may be perceived the progress of the philosophic doctrines of

Greece. The Fates, the Cocytus, the Styx, are to be found with all their details in the works of Plato. Here commences a distribution of punishments and rewards unknown to Homer. We have already observed that misfortune, indigence, and weakness, were, after death, banished by the pagans to a world as painful as the present. The religion of Jesus Christ has not thus repudiated the souls of men; on the contrary, it teaches the unhappy that when they are removed from this world of tribulation they shall be conveyed to a place of repose, and that, if they have thirsted after righteousness in time, they shall enjoy its rewards in eternity."

If philosophy be satisfied, it will not be difficult perhaps to convince the Muses. We must admit that no Christian poet has done justice to the subject of hell. Neither Dante, nor Tasso, nor Milton, is unexceptionable in this respect. There are some excellent passages, however, in their descriptions, which show that if all the parts of the picture had been retouched with equal care they would have produced a place of torment as poetical as those of Homer and Virgil.

CHAPTER XIV.

PARALLEL BETWEEN HELL AND TARTARUS.

Entrance of Avernus-Dante's gate of Hell-Dido-Francisca d'Arimino-Torments of the damned.

THE description of the entrance of Avernus in the sixth book of the Æneid contains some very finished composition:

Ibant obscuri solâ sub nocte per umbram,
Perque domos ditis vacuas et inania regna.

Pallentes habitant morbi, tristisque senectus,

1 Part i. book vi.

2 The pagan view respecting the infernal region was so manifestly unjust that Virgil himself was compelled to notice it:

sortemque animo miseratus iniquam. Eneid, b. vi.