That which with the heathen poets was but an episode, the religious element of the poem, as the 'Descent into Hades,' the 'Wanderings through Elysium,' etc., etc., ends by absorbing the entire work after the advent of Christianity. The 'Divine Comedy,' the 'Paradise Lost,' and the 'Messiah,' form a magnificent Christian trilogy, of which the scene is almost always in a supernatural sphere, and in which the principal actor is--the Providence of God.
On this subject we have no further time to dilate, and the reader may easily verify its truth for himself. If he would convince himself that the deepest draughts of inspiration have ever been drawn by the highest artists from religious ideas, let him add to the names above given, those of Fra Angelico, Fra Bartolomeo, Tintoret, Corregio, Murillo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and, in our own days, Overbeck; let him gaze into that divine face of godlike sorrow given us by an untaught monk, Antonio Pesenti, in his marvellous crucifix of ivory, let him listen to the pure ethereal strains of Palestrina, Pergolese, Marcello, Stradella, and Cherubini, and thus be assured that religion, the love of the Infinite, is the 'Soul of Art.'
The most terrible name, perhaps, in the juvenile literature of England and English America, during the last century and a half, has been that of WILLIAM KIDD, the pirate. In the nursery legend, in story, and in song, the name of Kidd has stood forth as the boldest and bloodiest of buccaneers. The terror of the ocean when abroad, he returned from his successive voyages to line our coasts with silver and gold, and to renew with the devil a league, cemented with the blood of victims shot down whenever fresh returns of the precious metals were to be hidden. According to the superstitious of Connecticut and Long Island, it was owing to these bloody charms that honest money-diggers have ever experienced so much difficulty in removing these buried treasures. Often, indeed, have the lids of the iron chests rung beneath the mattock of the stealthy midnight searcher for gold; but the flashes of sulphurous fires, blue and red, and the saucer eyes and chattering teeth of legions of demons have uniformly interposed to frighten the delvers from their posts, and preserve the treasures from their greedy clutches. But notwithstanding the harrowing sensations connected with the name of Kidd, and his renown as a pirate, he was but one of the last and most inconsiderable of that mighty race of sea robbers who, during a long series of years in the seventeenth century, were the admiration of the world for their prowess, and its terror for their crimes.