and what if more direct communication with us on the part of the operator, would of necessity put an end to the experiment? The petty human considerations of pride and modesty have nothing to do with the cordial magnitude of such guesses; and the beauty of them consists, we think, not merely in their cheerfulness and real piety, but in their adaptation to all experimental systems of utility, those of the most exclusive utilitarians not excepted. Such we confess is our own creed, which we boast at the same time to be emphatically Christian; and the good which our enthusiasm cannot help thinking such an opinion might do, will excuse us with the readers for this digression.*

The gods of Greece, taken in the popular view of them, were, upon the whole a jovial company, occasionally dispersed about the world, and assembling on Mount Olym

* The hope of a happier state of things on earth, argues nothing against a life hereafter. The fitness of a human soul for immortality may be a part of the experiment. The divinest preacher of eternity that has appeared, expressly anticipated a happier period for mankind in their human state, though many who are called his followers are eager to load both themselves and the world they live in with contumely, themselves as "innately vicious," and the world as "a vale of tears." Such are the compliments they think to pay their Creator! Yet these are the persons who talk with the greatest devotion of resigning themselves to God's will, and who pique themselves upon having the most exalted ideas of his nature! How much better to think it his will that they should bestir themselves to improve their own natures and the world! How much better to think it consonant with his nature that they should help to drain the "vale of tears," as they call it, just as they would any other valley, beauteous and full of resources! They do not think it necessary to be resigned when they can work for themselves; why should they when they can work for others? Resignation is always good, provided it means only patience in the midst of endeavor, or repose after it; but when it implies a mere folding of the hands, and a despair of making any thing good out of "God's own work," it is surely the lowest and most equivocal aspect under which piety could wish to be drawn.

pus. They dined and supped there, and made love like a party of gallants at a king's table. A pretty girl served instead of a butler; and the Muse played the part of a band.* When they came down to earth, they behaved like the party going home; made love again after their fashion; interfered in quarrels, frightened the old and the feeble; and next day joined a campaign, or presided at an orthodox meeting. In short, they did whatever the vulgar thought gallant and heroical, and were particularly famous for having their own way. If a god offended against all humanity, he had his reasons for it, and was a privileged person. He could do no wrong. But if humanity went counter to a god, the offender and all his generation were to suffer for it. A lady who had resisted the violence of his virtue, was not to be believed whenever she spoke the truth; or your brother became an owl or a flint-stone; or your son was to become a criminal, or a madman, because his grandfather unwittingly married against the god's, consent. The vulgar thought how wilful and unjust they would be themselves if they had power; they saw how much kings were given to those kinds of peccadilloes; and therefore, if they could have become gods, how much more they would have been ungodly! It is true the philosopher refined upon all this: and agreeably to the way in which Nature works, there was a sort of cultivation of energy underneath it and an instinct of something beyond

* See the description in books and prints, the marriage of Cupid and Psyche. Raphael made a picture of it. Augustus is charged with having made an impious entertainment in imitation of these "charming noons and nights divine." Ben Jonson, we suppose in consideration of King James, who besides being a classical monarch, was devout as well as debauched, - has taken the liberty of misrepresenting the charge in his Poetaster, and making Augustus astonished at the impiety in others.

the common theories of right and wrong. Nature's character remained safe, and her good work proceeded. The divinity within us was superior to the ideas of him which we threw up.

Homer makes the gods of a mighty size. His Neptune goes a hundred miles at a stride. This grandeur is of a questionable sort. Homer's men become little in proportion as the gods become great; and Mars and Minerva lording it over a battle, are like giants "tempesting" among a parcel of mice. The less they were seen, the less the dignity on either side was compromised; for their effect might be as gigantic as possible.

The truest grandeur is moral. When there is a heavenquake because Jupiter has bent his brows;—when Apollo comes down in his wrath "like night-time," and a plague falls upon the people; when a fated man in a tragedy is described sleeping at the foot of an altar with three tremendous looking women (the furies) keeping an eye upon him; when a doomed old man in a grove is called away by a voice, - after which he is never more seen; or to turn the brighter side of power, when Bacchus leaps out of his chariot in Titian's picture, looking (to our mortal eyes) with the fierce gravity of a wine-god's-energy, though he comes to comfort a mourner; or to sum up all that is sweet as well as powerful, when Juno goes to Venus to borrow her girdle, in order that she may appear irresistible in the eyes of Jupiter; it is then we feel all the force and beauty of the Greek fables; and an intimacy with their sculpture shows us the eternal youth of this beauty, and renders it a sort of personal acquaint

ance.

Milton wrote some fine verses on the cessation of heathen oracles, in which while he thinks he is triumphing

over the dissolution of the gods like a proper Christian,
he is evidently regretting and lingering over them, as was
natural to a poet. He need not have lamented. A proper
sense of universality knows how to reconcile the real
beauty of all creeds; and the gods survive in the midst of
his own epic, lifted by his own hand above the degrada-
tion to which he has thrust them. Vulcan, he says, was
called Mammon in heaven, and was a fallen angel. But
he has another name for him better than either.
how he rolls the harmony of his vowels.

Nor was his name unheard, or unador'd
In ancient Greece; and in Ausonian land
Men call'd him Mulciber; and how he fell
From heav'n, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o'er the crystal battlements. From morn
To noon he fell; -from noon to dewy eve,-
A summer's day; and with the setting sun

Dropt from the zenith like a falling star

On Lemnos th' Ægean Isle. Thus they relate,
Erring.

Hear

PAR. LOST, Book I.

"Not more than you did," Homer might have said to him in Elysium, "when you called my divine architect a sordid archangel fond of gold, and made him fall from a state of perfect holiness and bliss, which was impossible."

"Brother, brother," Milton might have said, glancing at the author of the "Beggar's Opera," "we were both in the wrong; except when you were painting Helen and Andromache, or sending your verses forward like a devouring fire."

"Or you," would the heroic ancient rejoin, "when you made us acquainted with the dignity of those two gentle creatures in Paradise, and wrote verses full of tranquil superiority, which make mine appear to me like the talking of Mars compared with that of Jupiter.”

No heathen paradise, according to Milton, could compare with his; yet in saying so, he lingers so fondly among the illegal shades that it is doubtful which he prefers.

Not that fair field

Of Enna, where Proserpine, gathering flowers,

Herself a fairer flow'r by gloomy Dis

Was gather'd; which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove
Of Daphne, by Orontes, and the inspir'd
Castalian spring, might with this Paradise

Of Eden strive; nor that Nyseian isle

Girt with the river Triton, where old Cham,
Whom gentiles Ammon call and Lybian Jove,

Hid Amalthea, and her florid son,

Young Bacchus, from his step-dame Rhea's eye.

Milton had, in fact, settled this question of the indestructibility of paganism in his youth. His college exercises showing that "nature could not grow old," showed also that the gods and goddesses must remain with her. The style of Milton's Latin verses is founded on Ovid; but his love of a conscious and sonorous music renders it his own, and perhaps there is nothing more like the elder English Milton than these young exercises of his in a classical language.

Dr. Johnson objects to Milton's Lycidas (which is an elegy on a lost companion of his studies), that "passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy; nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius; nor tells of rough Satyrs and Fauns with cloven heel." To which Wharton very properly answers, “but poetry does this: and in the hands of Milton does it with a peculiar and irresistible charm. Subordinate poets exercise no invention when they tell how a shepherd has lost a companion, and must feed his flocks alone, without any judge of his skill in piping; but Milton