Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/118



HE golden conception of a Paradise is the Poet's guiding thought. This bright Idea, which has suffused itself among the traditions of Eastern and of Western nations in many mythical forms, presents itself in the Mosaic books in the form of substantial history; and the conception, as such, is entirely Biblical. Genuine Poetry follows where a true Theology leads the way; and the one as well as the other must have—Truth in History—as its teacher and companion. It is in the style and mode of a true history that we receive the theologic principle of a Creation which was faultless, at the first. The beginning of history thus coincides with that first axiom of Religion which affirms all things to be of God, and all perfect. A morning hour of the human system there was when man—male and female—unconscious of evil, and unlearned in suffering, was inheritor of immortality. In this belief Piety takes its rise; and in this conception of the tranquil plenitude of earthly good—a summer's day of hom's unnumbered and unclouded—Poetry