Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/121

 disaical Love is conjugal fondness, free from sensuous taint. This Rural Life is the constant flow of summer days—spent in gardens and a-field—exempt from exacted toil. This Piety of Paradise is the grateful approach of the finite being to the —a correspondence that is neither clouded, nor is apprehensive of a cloud.

It was in the fruition of each of these elements of good that the days, or the years, or the centuries, of the Paradisaical era were passed; and it was then that those things which to their descendants are Poetry, to these—the parents of Mankind—were realities. Each of these conditions of earthly well-being was indispensable to the presence and preservation of the others; for there could be no Paradise if any one of them were supposed to be wanting or impaired. Without innocence earthly good is a debasing sensuality:—without love it is selfishness and war:—without piety earthly good, at the very best, is the dream of a day in prospect of an eternal night; and to imagine a Paradise planted in the heart of cities is a conception that is almost inconceivable.

In like manner as there could be no Paradise in the absence of these, its four elements, so neither can there be Poetry where these are not its inspiration, its theme, or its intention: or if not, we put it away as either a mockery of the sadness of human life, or as a vilifying slander. Love must be the soul of poetry: Purity must be its purpose and aim: