The multitude of things in Homer
is wonderful; their splendour, their truth, their force and variety.
His poetry is, like his religion, the poetry of number and form: he
describes the bodies as well as the souls of men.
The poetry of the Bible is that of imagination and of faith: it is
abstract and disembodied: it is not the poetry of form, but of power;
not of multitude, but of immensity. It does not divide into many, but
aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God.
It is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems
alone in the world, with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the
earth, and the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise,
but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power
that governs the universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from
humanity and a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and
intense, as it became more universal, for the Infinite is present to
everything: "If we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is
there also; if we turn to the east or the west, we cannot escape from
it".
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