There are people, and some of
them even poets, whose consciousness is so smothered behind the
senses, that they come short of belief in spiritual potency. They are
what, with felicity of phrase, Mr. Matthew Arnold calls--
"Light half-believers in our casual creeds."
Homer and Milton were believers: they believed in the visible, active
presence on the earth of the god Mars, and the archangel Raphael. Had
they not, there would have been no "Iliad," no "Paradise Lost."
Dante, too, was a believer; and such warm, wide sympathies had he, and
an imagination so daring, that he undertook to unfold the divine
judgment on the multitudinous dead, ranging with inspired vision
through hell, and purgatory, and heaven. In his large, hot heart, he
lodged the racy, crude beliefs of his age, and with poetic pen wrought
them into immortal shapes. The then religious imaginations of
Christendom, positive, and gross, and very vivid; the politics of
Italy, then tumultuous and embittered; the theology and philosophy of
his time, fantastic, unfashioned--all this was his material. But all
this, and were it ten times as much, is but the skeleton, the frame.
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