Powers of Perdition, and withal many earthly types in its action,—­it is by no means a mere imitation of the great German.  Its plan is wider.  It incorporates even more impressive spiritual material than ‘Faust’ offers.  Not only is its mortal hero, Festus, conducted through an amazing pilgrimage, spiritual and redeemed by divine Love, but we have in the poem a conception of close association with Christianity, profound ethical suggestions, a flood of theology and philosophy, metaphysics and science, picturing Good and Evil, love and hate, peace and war, the past, the present, and the future, earth, heaven, and hell, heights and depths, dominions, principalities, and powers, God and man, the whole of being and of not-being,—­all in an effort to unmask the last and greatest secrets of Infinity.  And more than all this, ‘Festus’ strives to portray the sufficiency of Divine Love and of the Divine Atonement to dissipate, even to annihilate, Evil.  For even Lucifer and the hosts of darkness are restored to purity and to peace among the Sons of God, the Children of Light!  The Love of God is set forth as limitless.  We have before us the birth of matter at the Almighty’s fiat; and we close the work with the salvation and ecstasy—­described as decreed from the Beginning—­of whatever creature hath been given a spiritual existence, and made a spiritual subject and agency.  There is in the doctrine of ‘Festus’ no such thing as the “Son of Perdition” who shall be an ultimate castaway.

Few English poems have attracted more general notice from all intelligent classes of readers than did ‘Festus’ on its advent.  Orthodoxy was not a little aghast at its theologic suggestions.  Criticism of it as a literary production was hampered not a little by religious sensitiveness.  The London Literary Gazette said of it:—­“It is an extraordinary production, out-Heroding Kant in some of its philosophy, and out-Goetheing Goethe in the introduction of the Three Persons of the Trinity as interlocutors in its wild plot.  Most objectionable as it is on this account, it yet contains so many exquisite passages of genuine poetry, that our admiration of the author’s genius overpowers the feeling of mortification at its being misapplied, and meddling with such dangerous topics.”  The advance of liberal ideas within the churches has diminished such criticism, but the work is still a stumbling-block to the less speculative of sectaries.

The poem is far too long, and its scope too vast for even a genius of much higher and riper gifts than Bailey’s.  It is turgid, untechnical in verse, wordy, and involved.  Had Bailey written at fifty instead of at twenty, it might have shown a necessary balance and felicity of style.  But, with all these shortcomings, it is not to be relegated to the library of things not worth the time to know, to the list of bulky poetic failures.  Its author blossomed and fruited marvelously early; so early and with such unlooked-for fruit that the unthinking