It is impossible to pay a higher compliment to poetry, than to consider the effects it has in common with religion, yet distinct as far as distinct can be, where there is no division in those qualities which religion exercises and diffuses over all mankind, as far as they are subject to its influence. I have often thought that religion (speaking of it only as it accords with poetry, without reference to its more serious impressions) is the Poetry of all mankind, so as both have for their object:—

1. 1. To generalise our notions; to prevent men from confining their attention solely, or chiefly, to their own narrow sphere of action, and to their own individualizing circumstances; but by placing them in awful relations it merges the individual man in the whole, and makes it impossible for any one man to think of his future, or of his present, lot, without at the same time comprising all his fellow-creatures.

2. 2. That it throws the object of deepest interest at a distance from us, and thereby not only aids our imagination, but in a most important way subserves the interest of our virtues; for that man is indeed a slave, who is a slave to his own senses, and whose mind and imagination cannot carry him beyond the narrow sphere which his hand can touch, or even his eye can reach.

3. 3. The grandest point of resemblance between them is, that both have for their object (I hardly know whether the English language supplies an appropriate word) the perfecting, and the pointing out to us the indefinite improvement of our nature, and fixing our attention upon that. It bids us, while we are sitting in the dark round our little fire, still look at the mountain-tops, struggling with the darkness, and which announces that light which shall be common to us all, and in which individual interests shall dissolve into one common interest, and every man shall find in another more than a brother.