Hence all original
religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus,
have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the
circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called,
in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet
essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not
only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws
according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds
the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower
and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets
in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as
surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of
superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy rather
than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the
eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his
conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms
which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and
the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest
poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aschylus,
and the book of Job, and Dante's Paradise, would afford, more than any
other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did
not forbid citation.
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