Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

If we are looking, however, for more direct expressions of the idealism of feeling, of love, and the sense of beauty passing into religion, we shall do well to turn to another I...

In every imaginative sphere the nineteenth century has been an era of chaos, as it has been an era of order and growing organization in the spheres of science and of industry. A...

The impulse that would throw over as equally worthless every product of human art, because it is not indistinguishable from some alleged external reality, does not perceive the...

If the function of poetry, however, did not go beyond this recovery of sensuous and imaginative freedom, at the expense of disrupting our useful habits of thought, we might be g...

Why the world is as it is, whether of itself or by refraction in the medium of our intellect, is not a question that affects the practical moralist. What concerns him is that th...

There are, indeed, numerous exclamations and invocations in Shakespeare which we, who have other means of information, know to be evidences of current religious ideas. Shakespea...

If we judge this interpretation by poetic standards, we cannot resist the conclusion that the old version was infinitely superior. The Protestant, with his personal resources, w...

While he thus preferred to withdraw, without rancour and without contempt, from the ancient fellowship of the church, he assumed an attitude hardly less cool and deprecatory tow...

Democracy was not to be merely a constitutional device for the better government of given nations, not merely a movement for the material improvement of the lot of the poorer cl...

The baselessness and elaboration of this theology were, of course, far from being obstacles to its success in such an age. On the contrary, the less evidence could be found in c...

"That ever will Oppress my heart with many a watery hill? And therefore let him choose some other land, Where he shall please, to build at his command Temple and grove set thick...

For the Oriental, who believed in transmigration, the individual dissolved into an infinity of phases; he went on actually and perpetually, as Nature does; his immortality was a...

The following volume is composed of a number of papers written at various times and already partially printed; they are now revised and gathered together in the hope that they m...

Such is the necessary logic of natural religion. If Nature manifests the existence of a god, she must to that extent manifest his character; if she does not manifest his charact...

[1] "And so aboute foure of the clocke in the afternoone, the Kynge when he saw no apparaunce of enemies, caused the retreite to be blowen, and gathering his army togither, gave...

The nineteenth century, as we have already said, has nourished the hope of abolishing the past as a force while it studies it as an object; and Browning, with his fondness for a...

Such analogies carry us, no doubt, far beyond the intention of the hymn or of the exoteric religion to which it ministers. The story-teller's delight in his story is the obvious...

Nevertheless, the function of poetry, like that of science, can only be fulfilled by the conception of harmonies that become clearer as they grow richer. As the chance note that...