In the poetry of the Hebrews, accordingly, the locusts are God’s “great army;”—the winds are his messengers, the thunder his voice, the lightning a “fiery stream going before him,” the moon his witness in the heavens, the sun a strong man rejoicing to run his race—all creation is roused and startled into life through him—its every beautiful, or dire, or strange shape in the earth or the sky, is God’s movable tent; the place where, for a season, his honor, his beauty, his strength, and his justice dwell—the tenant not degraded, and inconceivable dignity being added to the abode. His mere “tent,” however—for while the great and the infinite are thus connected with the little and the finite, the subordination of the latter to the former is always maintained. The most magnificent objects in nature are but the mirrors to God’s face—the scaffolding to his future purposes; and, like mirrors, are to wax dim; and, like scaffolding, to be removed. The great sheet is to be _received up_ again into heaven. The heavens and the earth are to pass away, and to be succeeded, if not by a purely mental economy, yet by one of a more spiritual materialism, compared to which the former shall no more be remembered, neither come into mind. Those frightful and fantastic forms of animated life, through which God’s glory seems to shine with a struggle, and but faintly, shall disappear—nay, the worlds which bore, and sheltered them in their rugged dens and eaves, shall flee from the face of the regenerator. “A milder day” is to dawn on the universe—the refinement of matter is to keep pace with the elevation of mind. Evil and sin are to be eternally banished to some Siberia of space. The word of the poet is to be fulfilled, “And one eternal spring encircles all!” The mediatorial purpose of creation, fully subserved, is to be abandoned, that we may see “eye to eye,” and that God may be “all in all.” That such views of matter—its present ministry—the source of its beauty and glory—and its future destiny, transferred from the pages of both Testaments to those of our great moral and religious poets, have deepened some of their profoundest, and swelled some of their highest strains, is unquestionable. Such prospects as were in Milton’s eye, when he sung, “Thy Saviour and thy Lord Last in the clouds from heaven to be revealed, In glory of the Father to dissolve Satan with his perverted world; then raise From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined, New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date,” may be found in Thomson, in his closing Hymn to the Seasons, in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings,” (in Shelley’s “Prometheus” even, but perverted and disguised), in Bailey’s “Festus” (cumbered and entangled with his religious theory); and more rootedly, although less theologically, than in all the rest, in the poetry of Wordsworth.