it—­an invisible hand is suspended over it.  The spirit of the Christian religion consists in the glory hereafter to be revealed; but in the Hebrew dispensation, Providence took an immediate share in the affairs of this life.  Jacob’s dream arose out of this intimate communion between heaven and earth:  it was this that let down, in the sight of the youthful patriarch, a golden ladder from the sky to the earth, with angels ascending and descending upon it, and shed a light upon the lonely place, which can never pass away.  The story of Ruth, again, is as if all the depth of natural affection in the human race was involved in her breast.  There are descriptions in the book of Job more prodigal of imagery, more intense in passion, than any thing in Homer, as that of the state of his prosperity, and of the vision that came upon him by night.  The metaphors in the Old Testament are more boldly figurative.  Things were collected more into masses, and gave a greater momentum to the imagination.

Dante was the father of modern poetry, and he may therefore claim a place in this connection.  His poem is the first great step from Gothic darkness and barbarism; and the struggle of thought in it to burst the thraldom in which the human mind had been so long held, is felt in every page.  He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the ancient and the modern world; and saw the glories of antiquity dawning through the abyss of time, while revelation opened its passage to the other world.  He was lost in wonder at what had been done before him, and he dared to emulate it.  Dante seems to have been indebted to the Bible for the gloomy tone of his mind, as well as for the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry; but he is utterly unlike Homer.  His genius is not a sparkling flame, but the sullen heat of a furnace.  He is power, passion, self-will personified.  In all that relates to the descriptive or fanciful part of poetry, he bears no comparison to many who had gone before, or who have come after him; but there is a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lies like a dead weight upon the mind; a benumbing stupor, a breathless awe, from the intensity of the impression; a terrible obscurity, like that which oppresses us in dreams; an identity of interest, which moulds every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the passions and imaginations of the human soul,—­that make amends for all other deficiencies.  The immediate objects he presents to the mind are not much in themselves, they want grandeur, beauty, and order; but they become every thing by the force of the character he impresses upon them.  His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates, instead of borrowing it from them.  He takes advantage even of the nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject.  His imagination peoples the shades of death, and broods over the silent air.  He is the severest of all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the