This

obedience or love or gift which is of force." feeling becomes stronger the more the mind is influenced by Christianity, and this it is which has transferred the interest from the outward manifestation of the passions exhibited in the Iliad, to those inward struggles made by a power greater than they to control them, and cause them, instead of bursting forth like lava-torrents to devour and blast the face of nature, to flow on like meadow-streams of life and joy. Why then it may be asked do we take an interest in Homer's heroes, whom the gods are ready every moment to shield or snatch from the dubious fight? Not, I answer, because we consider them mere machines acting but from others' impulses, for then we could take no interest in them; but because when

"Arms on armor clashing bray Horrible discord, and the madding wheels Of brazen chariots rage,"

we give to them our own freedom; or because the gods themselves, whom Homer has called down to swell the fight, and embodied in his heroes; because these create the interest and make what were before mere puppets free agents. When, in our cooler moments, we reflect on his Jove-protected warriors, his invulnerable Achilles, - they dwindle into insignificance, and we are ready to exclaim in the quaint

language of another, "Bully Dawson would have fought the devil with such advantages."

This sense of free agency is what constitutes Adam the hero of Paradise Lost, and makes him capable of sustaining the immense weight of interest, which in this poem is made to rest upon him. But that which renders Adam the hero of the poem, makes Satan still more so; for Milton has opened to our gaze, within his breast of flame, passions of almost infinite growth, burning with intensest rage. There is seen a conflict of "those thoughts that wander through eternity," at the sight of which we lose all sense of the material terrors of that fiery hell around him, and compared with which the physical conflict of the archangels is a mockery. It is not so much that battles present less a subject for description than they did in the time of Homer, that they fail to awaken those feelings of admiration they then did, but because we have become sensible of a power within which bids the tide of war roll back upon its fountains. For the same reason it is that the manners of civilized nations are unsuited for heroic song. They are no longer the representatives of greatness; for the heroism of Christianity

is not seen so much in the outward act, as in the struggle of the will to control the springs of action. It is this which gives to tragedy its superiority over the epic at the present day; it strikes off the chains

of wonder by which man has been so long fettered to the objects of sense, and, instead of calling upon him to admire the torrent-streams of war, it bids the bosom open whence they rushed, and points him downward to their source, the ocean might of the soul,

"Dark-heaving-boundless, endless, and sublime

The image of eternity- the throne
Of the Invisible."

Thus Milton's poem is the most favorable model we can have of a Christian epic. The subject of it afforded him the only field of great epic interest, where the greatest power could be shown engaged in bringing about the greatest results. Adam is not so much the Achilles as the Troy of the poem. And there is no better proof that greatness has left the material throne, which she has so long held, for a spiritual one, than that Milton, in putting in motion that vast machinery which he did to effect his purpose, seems as if he made, like Ptolemy, the sun and all the innumerable hosts of heaven again to revolve about this little spot of earth. Though he has not made the Fall of Man a tragedy in form, as he first designed, he has yet made it tragic in spirit; and the epic form it has taken seems but the

drapery of another interest. This proves that, however favored by his subject, the epic poet of our day may be, he must by the laws of his own being possess an introspective mind, and give that which Bacon calls an inwardness of meaning to his characters, which, in proportion as the mind advances, must diminish that greatness once shown in visible action. The Christian Knights might well exclaim, when they first saw gunpowder used in war, as Plutarch tells us the king of Sparta did, when he saw a machine for the casting of stones and darts, that it was "the grave of valor." They were the graves of that personal valor which is shown in its perfection in the infancy of the mind, and which is imaged in the pages of Homer. In modern battles, the individuality of early times is lost and merged in one great head, with reference to which we view all results. The men upon whom the superior mind acts are mere mechanical instruments of its power, and the deeds seen by the outward eye are thus dimmed by the soul's quicker perception of spiritual action. Thus the intellectual power wielded by the commander seems already to have decided the battle, and we look with less interest upon his army's incursions into the territory of an enemy. As Sallust says of Jugurtha, “totum regnum animo jam invaserat."

To complain of this tendency of the human mind

and its influence on literature, to sigh that we cannot have another Homeric poem, is like weeping for the feeble days of childhood, and shows an insensibility to the ever-increasing beauty and grandeur developed by the spirit in its endless progress, a forgetfulness of those powers of soul which result from this very progress, which enable it, while enjoying the present, to add to that joy by the remembrance of the past, and to grasp at a higher from the anticipations of the future. With the progress of the arts, power is manifested by an agency almost as invisible as itself; it almost speaks and it is done, it almost commands and it stands fast. Man needs no longer a vast array of physical means to effect his loftiest purpose; he seizes the quill, the mere toy of a child, and stamps on the glowing page the copy of his own mind, his thoughts pregnant with celestial fire, and sends them forth, wherever the winds of heaven blow or its light penetrates, the winged messengers of his pleasure. The narrow walls of patriotism are broken down, and he is a brother on whom the same sun shines, and who holds the same heritage, the earth. He is learning to reverse the order in which the ancients looked at the outward creation, he looks at the world with reference to himself, and not at himself with reference to the world. How different the view which Virgil takes