ON THE MIDDLE OR DARK AGEts, 



igoddesses ; while those of Greece amounted, in Hesiod's time, to three 

 thousand ; and in that of Augustus, to thirty thousand. The same power 

 who, under the name of Loke, was their A-hriman, or Principle of Evil, 

 was also, for want of a larger establishment, their Momus and their Mer- 

 cury. As they had their war-songs and their war-speeches, they had also 

 their Apollo ; but, like the rest, he too was caparisoned with his javelin 

 and his hauberk, and was a god of battles as well as of eloquence. The 

 beatitudes of their paradise, those with which the most valiant of their 

 lieroes were rewarded after death, consisted, as we learn from the same 

 bloody iegends, in daily encounters of more than mortal fury ; in the course 

 of which the different combatants, mounted on fiery steeds, and clothed 

 an resplendent armour, mutually wounded, and were wounded in returuo 

 Though, when the battle was over, they bathed in fountains of living 

 water ; and being instantly healed, sat down to a sumptuous banquet, at 

 which Odin, their chief deity, presided, and passed the hours of midnight in 

 singing war songs and drinking goblets of mead. Even the web of future 

 events, woven by their three Parc^, was manufactured of strings of human 

 ■entrails, the shuttles being formed of arrows dipped in gore, and the 

 weights of the sculls of gasping warriors. It is to this fiction Mr. Gray 

 alludes so finely, but, at the same time, so fearfully, in his Ode entitled 

 The Fatal^isters." 



Now the storm begins to lower, \ 



(Haste ! the loom of hell prepare ;) 

 Iron sleets of arrowy shower 



Hurtles in the darkened air. 



Glittering lances are the loom 



Where the web of death we strain ; 

 Weaving many a soldier's doom, 



Orlcney's wo, and Randver's bane. 



See the gristly texture grow ! 

 'Tis of human entrails made 



And the weights that play below- 

 Each a gasping warrior's he ado 



Shafts for shuttles, dipp'd in gore, 



Shoot the trembling cords aiongo 

 vSword ! — that once a monarch bore, 



Keep the tissue close and strong. 



Horror covers all the faeath : — 



Clouds of carnage blot the sun :— 

 Sisters ! weave the web of death :— 



Sisters ! cease— the work is done ! 



Wke armies of the south of Asia, however, under the banners of Ma 

 liomet, were as little disposed, at least on the first spur of their fury, to 

 attend to the voice of literature, as those of the north. Yemen, or Happy 

 Arabia, till the time of this accomplished impostor, was equally the seat of 

 polite learning and of courage. It was in climate and language, as well 

 as inelegant pursuits, the Arcadia of the eastern world. Here the genius 

 . of poetry received his birth, and was nursed into maturity with fond and 

 incessant attention. The Persians caught the divine art from the Ara- 

 bians, as the Greeks afterwards caught it from the Persians. The best 

 pastoral poems in the world, or Casseidas, as they are called, and some of 

 the best epic productions, are of Arabian growth. Before the era of 



