dise of God once on earth, which, when man fell, like the child in the Apocalypse, was caught up to the eternal throne, and which the latter days shall see descending again from heaven, when there shall be no more pain or sickness, night, or death?

"The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God, who is our home."

"Hence in a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."

Fiction has, however, always combined with its retrospective tendency an onward pointing, a prophetic character, blending the functions of the seer and the poet; for mankind have always had a latent faith, that what has been will be again; that the golden age will return, and righteousness and truth, mercy and peace, dwell in close embrace upon the earth, that effete nature will renew her strength and put on her birthday apparel; that

"all fear

Of barrenness shall cease, and every field

Laugh with abundance, and the land once lean,
Or fertile only in its own disgrace,

Exult to see the thirsty curse repealed,

The various seasons woven into one,

And that one season an eternal spring."

Hardly is there a fiction of antiquity, however deep in the past the plot is laid, which presents not these foreshadowings, or, as they should rather be termed, these foreshinings of a paradise to come. Either the living seer is brought upon the stage to unrol the scroll of the future, or else the hero threads without dying, the dark way of death, and crosses the black river with the gloomy ferryman, to seek out the Shade of some illustrious ancestor, who may reveal the fates, and fortify him. for conflict and danger by the hope of better things to come. And may we not take this universal consent, in a brighter and

happier future as a pledge lodged in man's heart by its Author, that a future better than the past ever awaits our race; that humanity shall move on in an ever brightening path, evil evolving good, till hope shall become sight, and men shall copy into their annals the richest pages of prophecy?

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One nation only, we have said, writes no fiction, the Jewish, a striking fact, and one which seems to evince that they had in authentic revelations that for which other nations strove through the medium of fiction. They, (except in their times of national apostasy,) they alone, of all nations upon earth made no idols; for they had the true Jehovah, whose only image is that created by his indwelling in the soul of his worshipper. And it would seem as if they had extended to the golden past and to the golden future, the law which was given them against idolatry. They made no likeness of the Eden which was, or of the Eden which is to be. History and prophecy to them filled and transcended the highest sphere of fable. They could not equal that which was written by the unerring pen of inspiration, or heighten colors borrowed from the sky; and they wisely refrained from fiction, which must have fallen so far short of the delineations in their truthful records. They had in their sacred books a Paradise, in which were soft streams and gentle dews, every tree pleasant to the sight and good for food, and in which, above all, the parents of our race heard the voice of the Lord God in the cool of the day, and talked with him as a man talks with his neighbor. They had also the promise of one who should restore lost Eden, under whose reign the wolf and the lamb should lie down together, the desert blossom as the garden, and men learn war no more. Their yearnings were satisfied, their ideas of perfectness met and filled by this past and this future, which their earnest faith brought so nigh together as to overlap the dull and doubtful present. These revelations solved for them the enigma of life, which perplexed the whole Gentile world. They saw amidst all the confused and conflicting elements of nature and society a sovereign arm, a guiding Providence. The voice of the Lord was upon the waters, the winds were his angels, and flames of fire his ministers. In his hand were the hearts of men. By him kings reigned, and princes decreed justice. It was his to bring low and to raise up, to wound and to make whole. The people might rage and the nations take counsel; but he could make the wrath of man to praise him, and while

his covenant race were found in the way of his testimonies, he would say to the winds and the waves of human passion, "Touch not mine anointed, and do my servants no harm." For the sins of their first parents, Eden had indeed been barred by the angel of the flaming sword. For their own sins and the sins of their fathers, had the hour of redemption been delayed. But the time was approaching, the feet of those who should bring the glad tidings, were already on the mountains. With such a faith, for them to have given birth to a fictitious literature would have been as unnatural as to light a candle at noonday; and the absence of this element in Hebrew literature bears conclusive testimony to the sufficiency of the Jewish revelation for its times and its purposes.

Our remarks on the absence of fiction from the literature of the Hebrews demand perhaps a word or two of explanation. In the first place, we assume that the Mosaic records of the infancy of the race are not fictitious, and that the prophetical books are filled with actual predictions of the future; and these points, we hold ourselves prepared to maintain and defend, but deem the discussion of them out of place in a purely literary article. Then we are fully aware that parables and allegories are not infrequent in the Old Testament. But these are not

fiction in any proper sense of the word. They are not creations of the fancy conjured up for their own sakes, and designed to present imaginings and yearnings beyond human experience and attainment. They are simply a mode of illustration, a form of instruction, a mode, by which abstract truth is materialized, and brought down, as it were, to the sight and touch of the sensual and the unenlightened. Their province is the very reverse of that of the higher fiction, which exalts, expands, and spiritualizes the material, and bears the soul away from the visible and the tangible. We are aware also that if fiction mean merely the direct opposite of fact and truth, the Talmuds and the Rabbinical writings contain nothing but fiction. But so far as our imperfect and fragmentary knowledge of those works extends, they contain nothing, that betrays inventive genius, an excursive imagination, or creative power. On the other hand, they are full of conceits so anile, vapid and absurd, as to put them entirely out of the pale of literature, and to forfeit for their vast and formless mass even a humble or an undefined place among the products of mind. And finally, we are aware that the book of Job is often called a dramatic

poem. We should rather term it a disquisition upon Providence thrown for convenience into an interlocutory form; for it is entirely devoid of dramatic interest. Its successive dialogues, or rather monologues, are not connected with the development of any artificial plot, and the brief narrative contained in the first and last chapters is not improbably the actual history of Job, with some slight poetic grouping of incidents and rounding of numbers. But, however the book may be regarded, it is by no means certain that it is of Hebrew authorship. It has been supposed by many, and not without good reason, to be older than the Pentateuch, and to have been written in Edom or Arabia by some devout descendant of Ishmael or Esau, who inherited the religious faith of Abraham, but was without the formal line of the Jewish covenant.

We come now to the bearing of Christianity upon fictitious literature; and our readers have no doubt anticipated our conclusion, that Christianity is unfavorable to fiction. But, it will be asked, has not modern Christendom been deluged by works of fiction, and, of master-works in this department, do even Homer and Virgil retain the palm unchallenged? To these questions, we would reply, that the intellectual reign of Christianity has but just begun. The ages that have passed, have regarded the gospel as a light to be enclosed on either side, and to be permitted to shine only on the straight and narrow path of duty, not as the all-quickening sunlight, in which nature and life must be bathed, in order to be seen as they truly are. The rays of the divine image in Jesus have indeed gladdened and sanctified myriads, that none can number, of individual hearts; but it is just beginning to rest on the outward creation, on the course of human affairs, on the various departments of intellectual culture. Much of the fiction, that has grown on Christian soil, is therefore of the heathen school, while much that bears the name of fiction is mere allegory, which does not create, but simply teaches.

The great Christian epics, so called, differ very widely from the ancient epics. The latter depend for their interest upon their plot, upon the majestic progress and triumphant issue of heroic adventures, exposures, darings, and sacrifices. Dante's great poem, on the other hand, has no plot, no epic unity, no progress or catastrophe, it is a mere allegory, with which is interwoven with infinite skill and power a large part of the then recent history of Italy, together with an enduring me

mento of the poet's personal friendships, and of his burning, withering hatred.

Paradise Lost, as a work of art, stands unsurpassed. But it is composed of heterogeneous and conflicting elements. It blends allegory and fiction; and what of fiction it contains is far from being throughout of the Christian school. While its prime object was the exposition of Christian theology, and the incidents on which the plot hinges, are the leading features of the Christian scheme of redemption, as understood by the poet, the development of the plot is of a Pagan stamp, and a large part of the imagery and the machinery is Pagan, though with Christian names. The idea of fierce verbal controversy and deadly personal combat, (deadly, could angels die,) between the hosts of heaven and of hell, which runs through the whole poem, is borrowed from the wars of the gods and giants in the Greek mythology; and the frequent coincidence in conception and imagery, between Paradise Lost and Hesiod's Theogony, shows that Milton enjoyed far other sources of inspiration than

"Siloa's brook that flowed

Fast by the oracle of God."

The romances of the middle ages were crowded with Pagan ideas and imagery, borrowing their style, tone, and incidents, sometimes from classic sources, but oftener from superstitions indigenous to the countries where they were written, and from the gorgeous creations of Oriental fiction made current in Europe through the Saracens.

Modern tragedy, except in Shakspeare's hands, has been constructed on classic models, and has succeeded best when it has drawn its themes and its plots from ancient history and mythology. Talfourd, whose lon is undoubtedly the most exquisitely chiselled tragedy, that has made its appearance in Christendom, expresses the conviction, that true tragedy can be kept in being as a form of intellectual art, only by preserving the Destiny of the Greek tragedians for its moving spring.

The novel is of modern origin; and we may be pointed, for a proof that fiction cannot die, to the multitude of novels, for which we can find no more apt comparison, than that of the frogs in Egypt, which came into the very beds, and ovens, and kneading troughs of the Egyptians, books, too many of them, like that which St. John ate in his vision, in his mouth sweet as honey, but so soon as he had eaten it, bitter. Novels are of two classes. The most numerous is of those, which VOL. XXXII. 3D. S. VOL. XIV. NO. 1. 2