The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have
conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; and when change
and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of
those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators
will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral
Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped
with the eternity of genius.
Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is,
the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and
intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion
of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it:
developing itself in correspondence with their development. For
Lucretius had limed the wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of
the sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his
genius, had affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created
anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds,
though their notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber,
Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil
a single condition of epic truth. Milton was the third epic poet.
For if the title of epic in its highest sense be refused to the
Aeneid, still less can it be conceded to the Orlando Furioso, the
Gerusalemme Liberata, the Lusiad, or the Fairy Queen.
Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient
religion of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their
poetry probably in the same proportion as its forms survived in
the unreformed worship of modern Europe.
Pages:
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104