descriptive poetry. This species of poetry, however, was more or less known among other idolatrous nations, who were strangers to the mythologic system; witness the Sanscrit poems, the tales of the Arabs, the Edda of the Scandinavians, the songs of the negroes and the savages. But, as the infidel nations have always mingled their false religion, and consequently their bad taste, with their compositions, it is under the Christian dispensation alone that nature has been delineated with truth.

2

CHAPTER III.

HISTORICAL PART OF DESCRIPTIVE POETRY AMONG THE MODERNS.

No sooner had the apostles begun to preach the gospel to the world than descriptive poetry made its appearance. All things returned to the way of truth, before Him who, in the words of St. Augustin, holds the place of truth on earth. Nature ceased to speak through the fallacious organ of idols; her ends were discovered, and it became known that she was made in the first place for God, and in the second for man. She proclaims, in fact, only two things: God glorified by his works, and human wants supplied.

This great discovery changed the whole face of the creation. From its intellectual part, that is to say, from the divine intelligence which it everywhere displays, the soul received abundance of food; and from its material part the body perceived that every thing had been formed for itself. The vain images attached to inanimate beings vanished, and the rocks became much more really animated, the oaks pronounced more certain oracles, the winds and the waves emitted sounds far more impressive, when man had discovered in his own heart the life, the oracles, and the voice of nature.

Hitherto solitude had been looked upon as frightful, but Chris

1 The facts on which this assertion is grounded are developed in note W, at the end of the volume. 2 See note R.

tians found in it a thousand charms. The anchorets extolled the beauties of rocks and the delights of contemplation; and this was the first stage of descriptive poetry. The religious who published the lives of the first fathers of the desert were also obliged to describe the retreats in which these illustrious recluses had buried their glory. In the works of a Jerome and of an Athanasius1 may still be seen descriptions of nature which prove that they were not only capable of observing, but also of exciting a love for what they delineated.

This new species of composition introduced into literature by Christianity rapidly gained ground. It insinuated itself even into the historic style, as may be remarked in the collection known by the name of the Byzantine, and particularly in the histories of Procopius. It was in like manner propagated, but in a degenerate form, by the Greek novelists of the Lower Empire and by some of the Latin poets in the West.

When Constantinople had passed under the yoke of the Turks, a new species of descriptive poetry, composed of the relics of Moorish, Greek, and Italian genius, sprang up in Italy. Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, raised it to a high degree of perfec tion. But this kind of description is deficient in truth. It consists of certain epithets incessantly repeated and always ap plied in the same manner. It was impossible to quit the shady forest, the cool cavern, or the banks of the limpid stream. Nothing was to be seen but groves of orange-trees and bowers of jessamine and roses.

Flora returned with her basket, and the eternal Zephyrs failed not to attend her; but they found in the woods neither the Fauns nor the Naiads, and, had they not met with the Fairies and the Giants of the Moors, they would have run the risk of losing themselves in this immense solitude of Christian nature. When the human mind advances a step, every thing must advance with it; all nature changes with its lights or its shadows. Hence, it would be painful to us now to admit petty divinities where we see naught but wide-extended space. Place, if you will, the mistress of Tithonus upon a car, and cover her with flowers and with dew; nothing will prevent her appearing dis

1 Hieron., in Vit. Paul.; Athan., in Vit. Anton.

proportionate, while shedding her feeble light through the boundless firmament which Christianity has expanded; let her then leave the office of enlightening the world to Him by whom it was created.

From Italy this species of descriptive poetry passed into France, where it was favorably received by a Ronsard, a Lemoine, a Coras, a St. Amand, and the early novelists. But the great writers of the age of Louis XIV., disgusted with this style of delineation, in which they discovered no marks of truth, banished it both from their prose and their poetry; and it is one of the distinguishing characteristics of their works that they exhibit no traces of what we denominate descriptive poetry.1

Thus repulsed from France, the rural muse sought refuge in England, where Spenser, Milton, and Waller had paved the way for her reception. Here she gradually lost her affected manner, but she fell into another excess. In describing real nature alone, she attempted to delineate every thing, and overloaded her pictures either with objects too trivial or with ridiculous circumstances. Thomson himself, in his Winter, so superior to the other parts of his poem, has some passages that are very tedious. Such was the second epoch of descriptive poetry.

From England she returned to France, with the works of Pope and the bard of the Seasons. Here she had some difficulty in gaining admission, being opposed by the ancient Italian style, which Dorat and some others had revived; she nevertheless triumphed, and for the victory was indebted to Delille and St. Lambert. She improved herself under the French muse, submitted to the rules of taste, and reached the third epoch.

It must, however, be observed that she had preserved her purity, though unknown, in the works of some naturalists of the time of Louis XIV., as Tournefort and Dutertre. The latter displays a lively imagination, added to a tender and pensive genius: he even uses the word melancholy, like Lafontaine, in the sense in which we at present employ it. Thus the age of Louis XIV. was not wholly destitute of genuine descriptive poetry, as we might at first be led to imagine; it was only confined to the

1 Fénélon, Lafontaine, and Chaulieu, must be excepted. Racine the younger, the father of this new poetic school, in which Delille has excelled, may also be considered as the founder of descriptive poetry in France.

letters of our missionaries;1 and here it is that we have studied this kind of style, which we consider so new at the present day.

The admirable passages interspersed in the Bible afford a twofold proof that descriptive poetry is among us the offspring of Christianity. Job, the Prophets, Ecclesiasticus, and the Psalms, in particular, are full of magnificent descriptions. What a master-piece of this kind is the one hundred and third psalm!—

"Bless the Lord, O my soul! O Lord, my God, thou art exceedingly great!. . . . . Thou hast appointed darkness, and it is night in it shall all the beasts of the woods go about. The young lions roaring after their prey, and seeking their meat from God. The sun ariseth, and they are gathered together: and they shall lie down in their dens. Man shall go forth to his work, and to his labor until the evening. How great are thy works, O Lord! thou hast made all things in wisdom: the earth is filled with thy riches. So is this great sea, which stretcheth wide its arms; there are creeping things without number: creatures little and great. There the ships shall go. This sea-dragon which thou hast formed to play therein."

Pindar and Horace have fallen far short of this poetry.

We were, therefore, correct in the observation that to Christianity St. Pierre owes his talent for delineating the scenery of nature; to Christianity he owes it, because the doctrines of our religion, by destroying the divinities of mythology, have restored truth and majesty to the deserts; to Christianity he owes it, because he has found in the system of Moses the genuine system of nature.

But here another advantage presents itself to the Christian poet. If his religion gives him a solitary nature, he likewise may have an inhabited nature. He may, if he choose, place angels to take care of the forests and the abysses of the deep, or commit to their charge the luminaries and spheres of heaven. This leads us to the consideration of the supernatural beings, or the marvellous, of Christianity.

1 The reader will see some fine examples of this when we come to treat of the Missions.

CHAPTER IV.

HAVE THE DIVINITIES OF PAGANISM, IN A POETICAL POINT OF VIEW, THE SUPERIORITY OVER THE CHRISTIAN DIVINITIES?1

"WE admit," impartial persons may say, "that, in regard to men, Christianity has furnished a department of the drama which was unknown to mythology, and that it has likewise created the genuine descriptive poetry. Here are two advantages which we acknowledge, and which may, in some measure, justify your principles, and counterbalance the beauties of fable. But now, if you are candid, you must allow that the divinities of paganism, when they act directly and for themselves, are more poetic and more dramatic than the Christian divinities."

At first sight, we might be inclined to this opinion. The gods of the ancients, sharing our virtues and our vices, having, like us, bodies liable to pain and irritable passions,-mingling with the human race, and leaving here below a mortal posterity,―these gods are but a species of superior men. Hence we may be led to imagine that they furnish poetry with greater resources than the incorporeal and impassible divinities of Christianity; but on a closer examination we find this dramatic superiority reduced to a mere trifle.

In the first place, there have always been, in every religion, two species of deity,-one for the poet and the other for the philosopher. Thus the abstract Being so admirably delineated by Tertullian and St. Augustin is not the Jehovah of David or of Isaias: both are far superior to the Theos of Plato or the Jupiter of Homer. It is not, therefore, strictly true that the poetic divinities of the Christians are wholly destitute of passions. The God

1 The word divinities here is employed in a wide sense, embracing the inhabitants of the spirit-world. T.

2 That is, in the representation or delineation of the Deity by means of human language. T.