No fact in the history of poetry is more striking than the necessity of religion as a source of inspiration. The _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ acquire their epic quality from the religion of Greece; gods stalk about, and Minerva’s shield resounds in the clangor with that of Achilles. The _Æneid_ would be beautiful without the association of mythology; but it is mythology which enhances its grace into grandeur. The Vedas are an expression of the religious aspirations of the Hindoos. The verse of Boccaccio is pleasing only in proportion as religion cleansed his pen. Petrarch’s sonnets would never have been written had not Laura taught him the distinction between pure love, as the church knows it, and the passions which carried Byron into hysterics. The Italian epic of the sixteenth century, _Jerusalem Delivered_, which is held by Hallam to be equal in grace to the _Æneid_, had the First Crusade for its theme. Would it have been possible for Milton to have written any poem equal to _Paradise Lost_ out of other than Scriptural materials? Aside from the literary characteristics and dramatic strength of the plays of Shakspeare, does not their chief value lie in their correct morality—the morality which is found nowhere outside Catholic teaching? This is not the place to discuss the modern decline of poetry. Matthew Arnold’s theory—it is a general favorite—is that history and boldly-outlined epochs make poetry; and Lowell says, in his essay on Milton, “It is a high inspiration to be the neighbor of great events.” But the last two centuries have been crowded with history; boldly-outlined epochs have lifted their awful summits in England, in France, in Italy, in the United States, in Spain. Where are the great poets among the verse-makers who have been neighbors of these great events, and might have caught high inspiration from them? Since the Reformation the moral world has been growing iconoclastic, and there is no poetry in iconoclasm. Next to religion, woman has been the great inspiration of poets; but the modern idea of marriage has shattered the sanctuary walls which Christianity erected around it; the sacredness of home is invaded, the oneness of love destroyed—there is no poetry in divorce. Is not the decline of poetry a very curious, if not a fatal, reply to the hypothesis of evolution, carried logically into the moral and intellectual world? Mr. Lowell completes his essay by a minute examination of Dante’s thought and style, as exhibited in the _Divine Comedy_; and we can find space only for the closing period: