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No child has recourse to imaginary personifications in order to account for the ordinary properties of objects which are not alive, or do not represent living things. It does not imagine that the taste of sugar is brought about by a god of sweetness, or that a spirit of jumping causes a ball to bound.
I imagine, though I do not presume to be sure, that any endeavour to save the intellectual and moral credit of Chaldaean religion, by suggesting the application to it of that universal solvent of absurdities, the allegorical method, would be scouted; I will not even suggest that any ingenuity can be equal to the discovery of the antitypes of the personifications effected by the religious imagination of later ages, in the triad Anu, Ea, and Bel, still less in Istar.
Nor had I less pleasure in contemplating the personifications of the beau idéal of the ancient sculptors, exhibited in their gods and goddesses, in whose faultless faces the expression of all passion seems to have been carefully avoided.
Beneath are the episodes of Her life: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the homage of the shepherds, and the presentation of Jesus to the High Priest; and the bend of the arch, rising to a point like a mitre above the Mother, has the mouldings enriched with two lines of figures, one of archangels bearing censers, with wings closely imbricated as if with tiles, the other of personifications of the seven liberal arts, each represented by two figures one allegorical, and the other the presentment of the inventor, or of the paragon of that art in antiquity.
The public pageants of the reign of his predecessor were uncommonly splendid, and being then first enlivened by the introduction of speaking allegorical personages, properly and characteristically habited, naturally led the way to these personifications, by which Moralities were distinguished from the simple religious dramas called Mysteries."
Poetic diction rebelled against the Augustan conventions, the stereotyped epithets, the frigid personifications. It abandoned the abstract and general for the specific and the picturesque. It turned to the language of real life, and then, dissatisfied, to the heightened language of passion.
His imagination went down to the very bases of things, and while his characters are the most natural that poet ever created, they are also perfectly ideal, and are more truly the personifications of abstract thoughts and passions than those of any allegorical writer whatever. Even in what seems so purely a picturesque poem as the "Iliad," we feel something of this.
The Hindu mythology, however, is the great obstacle which must ever prevent this poetry from becoming popular in the Western world. The great personifications of the Deity have not been softened down, as in the mythology of the Greeks, to the perfection of human symmetry, but are here exhibited in their original gigantic forms.
Of the myrtle, Payne Knight says that it "was a symbol both of Venus and Neptune, the male and female personifications of the productive powers of the waters, which appear to have been occasionally employed in the same sense as the fig and fig leaf."
Hereupon the three novitiate spirits questioned the two angelic spirits concerning heaven; and as two of the three novitiates were youths, and there darted from their eyes as it were a sparkling fire of lust for the sex, the angelic spirit said, "Possibly you have seen some females;" and they replied in the affirmative; and as they made inquiry respecting heaven, the angelic spirits gave them the following information: "In heaven there is every variety of magnificent and splendid objects, and such things as the eye had never seen; there are also virgins and young men; virgins of such beauty that they may be called personifications of beauty, and young men of such morality that they may be called personifications of morality; moreover the beauty of the virgins and the morality of the young men correspond to each other, as forms mutually suited to each other."
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