PREFACE.

"Of those which did believe the name of Hades to belong unto that general place which comprehended all the souls of men, some of them thought that Christ descended to that place of Hades, where the souls of all the faithful, from the death of the righteous Abel to the death of Christ, were detained, and there, dissolving all the power by which they were detained below, translated them into a far more glorious place, and estated them in a condition far more happy in the heavens above. * * * Another opinion hath obtained, especially in our Church, that the end for which our Saviour descended into hell was to triumph over Satan and all the powers below, within their own dominions. And this hath been received as grounded on the Scriptures and consent of Fathers."-Pearson on the Creed.

It was my purpose, in undertaking this work, to give poetic form, design, and history to the descent of Christ into hell; a fact that has for so many ages attracted the curiosity of the human mind, as to furnish occasion for surprise that the

attempt has not hitherto been made. As regards the end for which He descended, I have adhered to the Christian tradition that it was to free the souls of the ancient saints confined in the temporal paradise of the Under-world, embracing also in my design the less general opinion, that it was to demonstrate His universal supremacy by appearing among the damned.

A source of additional human interest was suggested by the relation which men, as a distinct order of beings, might be supposed to sustain to demons in the place of their common doom, and under new conditions of existence; such, I conceived, as would make it possible in some degree to realize even the divine fictions of the Greek mythology, under the forms and with the attributes accorded them by ancient religions, and by the poetry of all time. This could not fail to suggest the further conception of introducing the divinities of our forefathers, and of other great families of mankind, thus bringing together in action and contrast the deified men, or various representatives

of an heroic humanity, among different races: nor did it seem too great a stretch of imaginative probability to conceive that their general characteristics might be adopted and imitated by beings already invested by the human mind with an indefinite power, and inhabiting a world in which the wonderful becomes the probable.

But it is, after all, the general purpose of exhib. iting the triumph of moral power over all physical and inferior spiritual force, in the descent of Christ into hell, which gives my design the complex character of a mythic, heroic, and Christian poem, and, at the same time, constitutes the unity of its parts. The ancients, whose representative types I introduce, knew and appreciated but two kinds of power, brute or physical, and spiritual, including all occult and supernatural efficacy, and strength of intellect and will. Virtue, triumphant by the aid of adventitious force, or relying upon unconquerable pride and disdain to resist it, was the highest reach of their dynamic conceptions. Moral power is properly a Christian idea. It is not,

therefore, without what I conceive to be a true as well as a poetic apprehension of the design of the Descent into Hell, that the heroes of profane, and the not fabulous Titans of sacred antiquity, by their rivalries and contentions, brought together in arms for a trial of their comparative strength, are suddenly confronted with a common and dissimilar antagonist, and "all strength, all terror, single or in bands, that ever was put forth" opposed to that novel, and, save in the Temptation, hitherto untested power, represented by Christ, the author of the theory and master of the example.

He is not supposed to appear among them grasping in his hand ten thousand thunders,” but endued with an equal power, the result and expression of perfect virtue and rightful authority. His triumph is attributed neither to natural, nor to supernatural power; but to moral superiority, evincing itself in His aspect, and exercising its omnipotence upon the soul and conscience. That in the conception of a great Christian poet, His appearance among the rebel angels in heaven was