since they are placed before our eyes only to celebrate Him as Sovereign of all creatures. In pantheism, on the contrary, the immanence of God in objects elevates actual existence the world, nature, and man-to a real and independent dignity. The life of the spirit, communicated to the phenomena of nature and to human relations, animates and spiritualizes all things; it constitutes a wholly peculiar relation between the sensibility and the soul of the poet and the objects of which he sings. His heart, penetrated and filled with the divine presence, in changeless calm and perfect. harmony, feels itself dilated, aggrandized. He identifies himself with the soul of things, with the objects of nature which impress him by their magnificence, with all that appears to him worthy of commendation and love. He tastes, thus, an inward felicity, plunged as he is in ecstasy and ravishment. The depth of the romantic sentiment in the Occident shows, it is true, the same character of sympathetic union with nature; but, in the poetry of the North, the soul is more unhappy and less free; it contains more desires and aspirations, or, rather, it remains concentrated within itself, occupied wholly with itself; it is of a tender sensibility, which everything wounds and irritates. Such a concentrated sentimentality is expressed especially in the popular songs of barbarous nations.

On the contrary, a free, joyous devotion is peculiar to the Orientals; chiefly to the Mahometan Persians. These abandon completely and cheerfully their personality in order to identify themselves with all that is beautiful and worthy of admiration, as with God himself; and yet, in the midst of this resignation, they know how to preserve their freedom and internal calm, face to face with the world which environs them. Thus, in the burning ardor of passion, we see appear the most expansive felicity and freedom of expression (la parrhésie) of sentiment. revealed in an exhaustless wealth of brilliant and pompous images. Everywhere resound the accents of joy, of happiness, and of beauty. In the Orient, if man suffers and is unhappy, he accepts this as an irrevocable decree of destiny. He rests there, firm in himself, without appearing crushed or insensible, and without sadness or melancholy. In the poetry

of Hafiz we find many elegiac songs; but he remains as careless in grief as in happiness. He says, for example, somewhere: "Offer not thanks because the presence of thy friend illumines thee, but burn the taper as in woe, and be content." The taper teaches how at once to smile and to weep. It smiles through the serene light of its flame, even while it dissolves in burning tears. This is, indeed, the character of all this poetry.

To give a few images of a more special order; flowers and jewels, especially the rose and nightingale, play an important rôle in the poetry of the Persians. This animation of the rose and the love of the nightingale often recur in the verse of Hafiz. 66 Though thou art the sultana of beauty," says he, "abstain from scorning the love of the nightingale." He himself speaks of the nightingale of his own heart. We, on the contrary, when mention is made in our poetry of the rose, of the nightingale, of wine, etc., do so in a wholly different and more prosaic sense. The rose is presented only as an ornament "crowned with roses," etc.; or, if we hear the nightingale, his song only causes sentiments to awake within us. We drink wine, and we say it chases away care. But with the Persians the rose is not a simple ornament; it is not merely an image, a symbol. It appears to the poet to be indeed an animated being; it is a loved one, an affianced. He penetrates, in in.agination, to the soul of the rose. The same character which reveals a brilliant pantheism manifests itself in the most modern Persian poems.

Goethe, also, in opposition to the melancholy character and intense sensibility by which the poems of his youth are distinguished, experienced, in his maturer years, this serenity full of resignation; and even in his old age, as if penetrated by a sigh of the Orient, his soul filled with an immense felicity, he abandoned himself, in the heat of poetic inspiration, to this freedom of sentiment which preserves a charming carelessness even in polemic.

The various songs of which he constructed his West-Eastern Divan are neither mere plays of fancy nor yet insignificant poems for social pastime; they are inspired by a free senti

ment, full of grace and resignation. He himself calls them, in his song to Suleika, "Poetic pearls, which thy love, like waves of the sea, has cast upon the desert shore of my life. Gathered by dainty fingers, they have been set with jewels in an ornament of gold." "Take them," cries he to his beloved, "hang them upon thy neck, upon thy bosom, these dew-drops from Allah, matured in a modest shell-fish."

3. As to the genuine pantheistic unity, which consists in the joining of the soul with God, as present in the depth of consciousness, this subjective form is found in general in mysticism, as this is developed in the bosom of Christianity. We will content ourselves with citing, as example, Angelus Silesius, who has expressed the presence of God in all things—the union of the soul with God, that of God with the human soul-with an astonishing boldness of ideas, and with great depth of sentiment. He displays in his images a prodigious power of mystic representation. Oriental Pantheism, on the contrary, develops rather the conception of a universal substance in all visible phenomena, together with the resignation of man, who, in the measure that he renounces self, feels his soul aggrandized, delivered from the constraints of the finite, and who thus arrives at a supreme felicity in identifying himself with whatever is grand, beautiful, and divine in the universe.

II. Art of the Sublime-Hebrew Poetry.

1. God the Creator and Ruler of the Universe.-2. The Finite World stripped of all Divine Character.-3. Position of Man face to face with God.

But the genuine sublime is represented by Hebrew Poetry. Here, for the first time, God appears truly as spirit, as the invisible Being, in opposition to nature. On the other hand, the whole universe, notwithstanding the wealth and magnificence of its phenomena, when compared with the supremely great Being, is of itself nothing. A simple creation of God, submitted to His power, it exists only to manifest and glorify Him.

Such is the idea which forms the source of this poetry, of which the character is the sublime. In the beautiful, the idea

penetrates through the external reality of which it is the soul, and forms with it a harmonious unity. In the sublime, the visible reality, through which the Infinite manifests itself, is humbled in its presence. This superiority, this imperiousness of the Infinite, the immeasurable distance which separates it from the finite-this is what the art of the sublime should express. It is the religious art, the sacred art par excellence; its sole destination is to celebrate the glory of God. This office poetry alone can fulfill.

1. The dominant idea of Hebrew Poetry is God as Lord of the world; God in His independent existence and His pure essence, inaccessible to the senses and to all sensuous representation, which does not correspond to His greatness. God is the creator of the universe. All those gross ideas concerning the generation of beings give place to that of spiritual creation. "Let there be light and there was light." This phrase indicates creation by speech, which is itself the expression of thought and will.

2. Creation assumes then a new aspect: Nature and man are no longer deified. To the Infinite is distinctly opposed the finite, which is no longer confounded with the divine principle, as in the symbolic conceptions of other peoples. Situations and events take shape with greater clearness. Characters

take a more fixed, more precise, meaning. These are human figures which no longer present anything fantastic and foreign; they are perfectly intelligible, and approach us more nearly.

3. On the other hand, notwithstanding his impotence and his nothingness, man obtains here a freer and more independent place than in other religions. The immutable character of the divine will causes the idea of law to appear, and to this law man must render obedience. His conduct becomes enlightened, fixed, regular. The perfect distinction between the human and the divine, between the finite and the Infinite, brings to light that between good and evil, and permits an enlightened choice. Merit and demerit are the consequence. To live according to justice in fulfilling the law-this is the end of human existence, and it places man in direct relation with God. Here is the principle and explanation of his whole

The events of life

life, of his happiness, and of his sorrows. are considered as benefits, as recompenses, or as trials and chastisements.

Here, also, the miracle appears. Elsewhere all is of the nature of prodigy, and, hence, nothing is miraculous. The miracle presupposes a regular succession, a constant order, and an interruption of this order. But creation itself is altogether

a perpetual miracle, destined to serve for the praise and the glorification of God.

Such are the ideas which are expressed with so much brilliancy, elevation, and poetry in the Psalms - those classic examples of the sublime in the Prophets, and in the sacred books generally. This recognition of the nothingness of things, of the greatness and omnipotence of God, of the unworthiness of man in His presence, the complaints, the lamentations, the cry of the soul toward God, constitute their pathos and sublimity.

CHAPTER III.-REFLECTIVE SYMBOLISM,

Or that Form of Art of which the Basis is Comparison.

I. Under the name of Reflective Symbolism we are to understand a form of art wherein the idea is not only comprised within itself, but also expressly posited as distinct from the sensuous form by which it is represented. In the sublime the idea also appears as independent of this form; but here the relation of these two elements is no longer, as in the preceding stage, a relation based upon the very nature of the idea; it is, more or less, the result of an accidental combination, which depends upon the will of the poet, upon the depth of his spirit, upon the fervor of his imagination, or upon his genius for invention. He is able to set out either from a sensuous phenomenon to which he lends a spiritual meaning by taking advantage of some analogy; or from a conception or an idea, which he proceeds to clothe with a sensuous form; or he simply places one image in relation to another, because of their resemblance.

This mode of combination is distinguished, then, from naïve