ith the rapture of
Ariel, flying after sunset on the wings of the bat, or sucking in the
cups of flowers with the bee? Who does not shudder at the caldron of
Macbeth? Where is the philosopher who is not moved when he thinks of
the strange connection between the infernal spirits and "the sow's
blood that hath eaten her nine farrow?" But this difficult task of
representing supernatural beings to our minds, in a manner which shall
be neither unintelligible to our intellects nor wholly inconsistent with
our ideas of their nature, has never been so well performed as by
Dante. I will refer to three instances, which are, perhaps, the most
striking:--the description of the transformations of the serpents and
the robbers, in the twenty-fifth canto of the Inferno,--the passage
concerning Nimrod, in the thirty-first canto of the same part,--and the
magnificent procession in the twenty-ninth canto of the Purgatorio.

The metaphors and comparisons of Dante harmonise admirably with that
air of strong reality of which I have spoken. They have a very peculiar
character. He is perhaps the only poet whose writings would become much
less intelligible if all illustrations of this sort were expunged. His
similes are frequently rather those of a traveller than of a poet. He
employs them not to display his ingenuity by fanciful analogies,--not
to delight the reader by affording him a distant and passing glimpse of
beautiful images remote from the path in which he is proceeding, but to
give an exact idea of the objects which he is describing, by comparing
them with others generally known. The boiling pitch in Malebolge was
like that in the Venetian arsenal:--the mound on which he travelled
along the banks of Phlegethon was like that between Ghent and Bruges,
but not so large:--the cavities where the Simoniacal prelates are
confined resemble the Fonts in the Church of John at Florence.
Every reader of Dante will recall many other illustrations of this
description, which add to the appearance of sincerity and earnestness
from which the narrative derives so much of its interest.

Many of his comparisons, again, are intended to give an exact idea of
his feelings under particular circumstances. The delicate shades of
grief, of fear, of anger, are rarely discriminated with sufficient
accuracy in the language of the most refined nations. A rude dialect
never abounds in nice distinctions of this kind. Dante therefore employs
the most accurate and inf