into happier latitudes. Every shade we meet breathes love and forgiveness, The strange visitor is only charged with tidings of joy to the living, and messages of good-will. The heart lightens and brightens at every new stratum of the atmosphere in that rising region; the ascent is easy and light, like the gliding of a boat down stream. The angels we become familiar with are creatures of light, such as human imagination never before or afterwards conceived. They come from afar across the waves, piloting the barge that conveys the chosen spirits to Heaven, balancing themselves on their wide-spread wings, using them as sails, disdaining the aid of all mortal contrivance, and relying on their inexhaustible strength; red and rayless, at first, from the distance, as the planet Mars, when he appears struggling through the mist of the horizon, but growing brighter and brighter with amazing swiftness. They stand at the gate of Purgatory, they guard the entrance of each of the seven steps of its mountain,— -some with green vesture, vivid as new-budding leaves, gracefully waving and floating in ample drapery, fanned by their wings; bearing in their hands flaming swords broken at the point; others, in ash-coloured garments; others, again, in flashing armour, but all beaming with so intense, so overwhelming a light, that dizziness overcomes all mortal ken whenever directed to their countenance.

The friends of the poet's youth one by one arrest his march and engage him in tender converse. The very laws of immutable fate seem for a few instants suspended to allow full scope for the interchange of affectionate sentiments. The overawing consciousness of the place he is in for a moment forsakes the mortal visitor so miraculously admitted into the world of spirits. He throws his arms round the neck of the beloved shade, and it is only by the smile irradiating its countenance that he is reminded of the intangibility of its etherial substance. The episodes of the Purgatory are mostly of this sad and tender description. The historical personages introduced seem to have lost their own identity, and to have merged into a blessed calmness, the characterising medium of the region they are all travelling through.

But the Purgatory, and still more the Paradise of Dante are terra incognita to most of his readers, strange to say, to most of his warmest eulogists. They sink deep into the circles of Hell till they stick fast to it, forgetting that the poet's mind towers loftier and loftier with powers commensurate to the progress of his subject.

IX.

PARADISE.

THERE are forty days in Italy to the season of Lent, and every day has its sermon. Out of the numberless legion of priests and monks swarming on that genial soil, hardly three hundred are preachers. Sacred orators there are rare birds, and as such also migratory; they wander from place to place like strolling players. A bag of forty sermons will last throughout a man's life. Written among his school prize essays, learnt by heart by long usage, the same discourses will affect, charm, or terrify a hundred audiences. Success in the pulpit depends on the look of the person, his tone of voice, and impassioned delivery. Monks, Franciscans most of all, are, generally speaking, the darlings; with the coquetry of their shaven crown, with the picturesqueness of their flowing costume. Friar Jeromes and Friar Eustaces are as notorious characters as Grisi the singer, and Cerito the dancer.

Of the forty sermons comprising his Lent stock, or quaresimale, the

choice of subjects lies with the preacher himself; of four only the theme is given. These are delivered on appointed days. They are the test of the orator's abilities. The result of these four days' begging establishes for ever, or demolishes his reputation. The subject of these four benefit days called the Novissimi are the Last Judgment, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

The first, second, and third discourse are generally impressive enough. But the stumbling-block lies on the gate of Paradise. Mental and bodily pain surround us so incessantly in this our earthly abode, that it requires no extraordinary stretch of imagination to make a good hell or a plausible purgatory of it. But where is our pattern for the home of the elected? What do we know of pleasure on earth save only sensualities, that are neither unalloyed nor enduring? The poor Italian preachers dare not draw a picture of Pagan or Mohametan Paradise; they cannot cram their auditors with ambrosia and nectar, or allure them with a tableau vivant of ever-vernal Houris. Aware of the partiality of their countrymen for music, they paint the heavenly court as a never-ending concert; an orchestra of angels and doctors fiddling and strumming to eternity!

Dante, who was their authority for the realms of sorrow had, however, supplied them with a nobler element of celestial enjoyment. The most ardent longing of the human soul whilst imprisoned in clay, he argued, is thirst for knowledge-the highest reward to the enfranchised spirit, must therefore be inexhaustible, unlimited, unquenchable knowledge.

Paradise is, therefore, a long exposition of what mortals can and cannot know. Familiar with all the learning of his own times, Dante, a phoenix of geniuses, groped in the dark in pursuit of hidden truths; he toiled, he fretted, struggling to force his way through the iron limits of human understanding, he aspired beyond, beyond! and by the aid of daring assumptions and sweeping conclusions, by the daily practice of bewildering abstraction, he often hit the mark with wondrous accuracy, and vaguely, instinctively forestalled the more inert and plodding march of common intelligence.

Every branch of learning, in those singular times had for its ultimate object and subject-God. Colleges were almost exclusively divinity schools. All the classical lore that began slowly to emerge from the still smouldering ruins of ancient civilisation, all the arguments of the subtle and cavilling pseudo-Aristotelian philosophy, then on its utmost ascendency, were brought to bear on the most arduous points of theology. It was at the best an idle, impertinent, unprofitable divinity; it busied itself with inextricable niceties of abstruse definitions, it sought the solution or rather the tangible representation, the materialisation of the most awful mysteries; it inquired into the age, the rank, the attributes of the complicate hierarchy of spirits, it dived into fathomless metaphysical subtleties to account for the essence, the influence, the working of the Deity. The deluded enthusiasts; they forgot to love and to serve while they strove to know God!

And Dante was warm in the pursuit of this forbidden knowledge, as wild as any of the angelic or seraphic doctors that preceded him. He had explored all creation; but this glorified, without explaining, the Creator. He sought God in Heaven-saw him-and all the problems that harassed him before that terrible journey, became as simple, as obvious as every spot in the valley or the hill-side is laid bare to the gaze of him who looks down from the summit.

From that dizzy altitude the poet assumed the tone of an oracle: all that men sought he had found. A great deal of this superhuman knowledge was, indeed, lost to him, for so utterly absorbed were all his faculties in that intense contemplation, that they could hardly recover all consciousness, and render an account of the overpowering sensation. Still enough remained of the recollection, of the reflection of the ocean of light that but for an instant encompassed, ingulfed him-to enable him to amaze with its revelation the startled fancies of his benighted fellow mortals.

Dante's Heaven is indeed, heavenly. Angels' smiles beam through his verses. The progress from planet to planet, otherwise imperceptible is made manifest to him by successive changes in the countenance of his eternal guide, Beatrice. The increased effulgence of her heavenly loveliness makes him aware he is basking in the rays of a region of purer light. Her cheeks radiate with roseate smiles in the genial sphere of Venus; they glow with a phosphorescent light in the ruddy orbit of Mars; they fade in the silvery whiteness of the planet Jupiter, as a maiden's blush from which the crimson of sudden emotion is as suddenly seen to evanesce-and after thus passing successively through all phases of entrancing beauty, they are, all at once, bereft of their ineffable smile. Her face becomes a blank to her lover, lest the brilliancy of that smile should prove fatal to his unprotected eyes, burn and consume him—even as Semele was turned into ashes; for at every step in those eternal palace stairs, beauty kindles as it climbs, so that, but for the interference of a tempering medium, but for a partial eclipse, mortal ken would shrink from it, even as a leaf parched and withered by a thunder blast.

As in the region of eternal doom the souls of the reprobate were oftentimes deformed by their turpitudes so as to become indiscernible to all knowledge; so are now the chosen ones beautified beyond recognition. They have, at least, to the eyes of their mortal visitor, lost all shape and semblance to human beings. They assume the appearance of blazing lights, moving incessantly round with unutterable harmony, and sparkling with redoubled refulgency when they wish to address the earthly stranger; for every word conveyed through their lips is a message of love and joy-and joy shows itself in Heaven by increase of light, and every smile is a flash.

There is something wild, vague, overpowering in the strange phantasmagory of all these myriads of lights. They revolve around us as we read, like the undefinable splendours that, some of us may recollect, haunted our cradles in childhood, when a whole canopy, as if of coloured dots of vivid flame, glittered above our heads in an apparently boundless vastness of space, and rolled slowly and steadily about, till it seemed to set beneath us, and we hung upon it, at the height of many thousand fathoms, as if ready to plunge, cradle and all, into the luminous abyss, when we started up half in wonder, half in dismay, and roused the whole household with our infantine screams.

From the moment the poet is raised into the orbit of the moon, it seems as if a cloud encompassed him, translucent, solid, and high polished, even as adamant on which the sunbeams smite. Within the bosom of this ever-lasting pearl he glides, as a ray of light pierces through water, without dividing its substance: and through the faint dimness of the circumambient gem many faces are seen eagerly gazing at the new comer, even as human features appear faintly reflected in the still waves of a

shallow stream. As he soars up to the sphere of Mercury, the blessed souls come forth in many thousands to greet him like fish glancing through the waters of a quiet, clear lake; their eyes sparkle with celestial joy, and the more they feel their joy, the brighter they grow, till excess of light makes them utterly undistinguishable. Further up, in the orbit of Venus, they move in a mazy dance like sparks in fire, and with all the melody of voices chanting in chorus. They range themselves in the ruddy light of Mars in the shape of a cross of immense dimensions, through which they move like motes in the sunbeam, emitting an indistinct but exquisite melody entrancing the soul beyond all human comprehension. They swarm and sparkle like innumerable dazzling essences in the planet of Jupiter, warbling as they fly, and winging their course hither and thither, like flocks of birds when they wheel slowly round and round, hovering lovingly on the banks of a stream; till, after various transformations, they assume the shape of an immense eagle, and from the beak of the flaming bird their common mind is uttered, even as a multitude of glowing embers emits but one condensed heat. They flash upwards and downwards in the crystal sphere of Saturn, moving along an immense ladder, the summit of which is reared to the uppermost Heaven; but here both light and sound are equally lost to the sense of a living being—and he advances among them in awful silence and solitude, as his mortal clay can endure no further till inured to the whelming sensation by bathing his eyelids in the streams of pure light eternally flowing from the allembracing empyrean.

X.

DANTE'S MORAL AIM.

YET it is neither his inventive nor his descriptive powers, unmatched as they are, that men most unanimously admire in the genius of Dante. It is the great moral, religious idea, one and indivisible, ever consistent, which prompted, directed, achieved the work wherein Heaven and Earth had equal shares; the transcendent, never-lost-sight-of allegory of a human soul redeemed through the ordeal of an intense contemplation of eternity, reclaimed from worldly passions, and political rancours, by the purifying agency of love, and from this again raised to the still higher pursuit of recondite religious inquiry. The work of a whole existence, the Divine Comedy exhibits the various stages of a mind rising superior to itself by virtue of successive efforts, overcoming, step by step, the whole distance that separates the most imperfect of creatures from the perfection of the Creator. It is indeed the comedy-or say, the Sacred Drama of Life: exhibiting in the first act the tumultuous passions, in the second the gentle affections, in the third the noble yearnings of a man's heart on its heavenward progress.

I have said ever-consistent idea; for the earthly feelings of the highminded partizan, mellowed and softened though they be by the soothing influence of the etherial region he is lifted into, are not only not extinct or dormant in Heaven, but they seem to have sunk deeper and deeper into his soul, and to have assumed the character of unshaken religious convictions. That mysterious journey is the fulfilment of a great mission of justice and truth. There is rest for the relics of man in his tomb, but there is none for his memory. Posterity, as an immense jury, sits round his death-bed for his trial, but its sessions are adjourned to infinity. History

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issues no sentence that history may not repeal. A generous dispenser of praise and blame, it delights in visiting guilt within the silent sanctuary of the grave, in laying at rest oppressed innocence, still smarting and writhing under the lash of human injustice. This sublime office of supreme reviser of human judgments had Dante taken upon himself. He never swerved, never compromised with the awful responsibility of this sacred duty: "For," he reasoned, "if I am too timid a friend to truth, I apprehend my name will not go down among the remote generations to whom the present times shall be the times of yore." Truly was Dante, even in the heaven of his own fancy, a mortal, and therefore an erring judge. But, we contend, a conscientious judge. And when hurling the souls of Brutus and Cassius amongst traitors and murderers, in the lowest circle of Hell, he certainly suffered his religious and political system to get the better of his moral sense; but we cannot agree with those critics who attribute these and similar aberrations of judgment to violence of temper, or indulgence in morbid feelings; they were the result of stern, deepgrounded principles, the working of irresistible fatality. God ruled over the political, no less than over the material world, with eternal, immutable laws. Mortals who, either from error or malice, opposed these laws--who wrestled with God, must be crushed in the attempt, even as he who would turn the course of the spheres, or disturb the balance of worlds.

No man ever steered clear of rocks who followed up his system to the widest extent of its generalisation. Dante's catholicity of church and state too often led him to monstrous absurdities; and as his own views are uttered as the revealings of unerring, imperishable knowledge; as his own mind breathes through the eternal lips of prophets and apostles; as Heaven itself speaks through him-every paradox startles and revolts us as sheer blasphemy and impiety. For all the misconceptions of this daring mortal, God himself is made responsible!

With all these intrinsic and inevitable blemishes, however, the Divine Comedy is, perhaps, the most moral of books. No man ever rose from a deep, careful perusal of the whole work without feeling himself, in every respect, a nobler and a purer being. The religious tone of the poem works upon us with irresistible awe. There is a God in him, and the terror of his presence gradually creeps upon us. There is nothing mean or gross, or impertinently minute and circumstantial in the Heaven of Dante. A pure idealisation; it may not be God's own; but it is man's sublimest conception of Heaven. The progress of the Reformation and the prevalence of scepticism on merely divine subjects, have done away with the prestige of such sublime abstractions. Mortals, in our own days, read Dante's notions of Paradise with as little enthusiasm as they would feel for Hesiod's Theogony. They are struck with the poet's ingenuity; but the belief which could invest such conceptions with the sanctity of revealed truth is, for ever, extinct in their bosoms.

It is only as a poet, not as a prophet, that Dante is known. Yet the notion that his strain would go down to posterity as a second Apocalypse seems to lurk in every one of his verses. His own images worked upon his brains till they became inspired truth in his own eyes. The long contemplation of his subject had led to an actual apotheosis of his own mind. He had soared so far upwards that the most etherial substance of his spirit never found its way back again. The most earnest of all poetic minds, he saw and touched what other poets could only invent. His con