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[1] Burke’s writings are not poetry, notwithstanding the vividness of
the fancy, because the subject matter is abstruse and dry, not natural,
but artificial.   The difference between poetry and eloquence is, that the
one is the eloquence of the imagination, and the other of the
understanding.   Eloquence tries to persuade the will, and convince the
reason:  poetry produces its effect by instantaneous sympathy.   Nothing is
a subject for poetry that admits of a dispute.   Poets are in general bad
prose-writers, because their images, though fine in themselves, are not
to the purpose, and do not carry on the argument.   The French poetry
wants the forms of the imagination.   It is didactic more than dramatic. 
And some of our own poetry which has been most admired, is only poetry
in the rhyme, and in the studied use of poetic diction.
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He saw many countries, and the manners of many men; and he has brought them all together in his poem.  He describes his heroes going to battle with a prodigality of life, arising from an exuberance of animal spirits:  we see them before us, their number, and their order of battle, poured out upon the plain “all plumed like estriches, like eagles newly bathed, wanton as goats, wild as young bulls, youthful as May, and gorgeous as the sun at midsummer,” covered with glittering armour, with dust and blood; while the Gods quaff their nectar in golden cups, or mingle in the fray; and the old men assembled on the walls of Troy rise up with reverence as Helen passes by them.  The multitude of things in Homer is wonderful; their splendour, their truth, their force, and variety.  His poetry is, like his religion, the poetry of number and form:  he describes the bodies as well as the souls of men.

The poetry of the Bible is that of imagination and of faith:  it is abstract and disembodied:  it is not the poetry of form, but of power; not of multitude, but of immensity.  It does not divide into many, but aggrandizes into one.  Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God.  It is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude:  each man seems alone in the world, with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the sky.  It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs the universe.  As the idea of God was removed farther from humanity, and a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense, as it became more universal, for the Infinite is present to every thing:  “If we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we turn to the east or the west, we cannot escape from it.”  Man is thus aggrandised in the image of his Maker.  The history of the patriarchs is of this kind; they are founders of a chosen race of people, the inheritors of the earth; they exist in the generations which are to come after them.  Their poetry, like their religious creed, is vast, unformed, obscure, and infinite; a vision is upon