with the dearest of social ties?

To those who think thus, the insensibility of the Florentine poet to
the beauties of nature will not appear an unpardonable deficiency. On
mankind no writer, with the exception of Shakspeare, has looked with
a more penetrating eye. I have said that his poetical character had
derived a tinge from his peculiar temper. It is on the sterner and
darker passions that he delights to dwell. All love excepting the
half-mystic passion which he still felt for his buried Beatrice, had
palled on the fierce and restless exile. The sad story of Rimini is
almost a single exception. I know not whether it has been remarked,
that, in one point, misanthropy seems to have affected his mind, as
it did that of Swift. Nauseous and revolting images seem to have had a
fascination for his mind; and he repeatedly places before his readers,
with all the energy of his incomparable style, the most loathsome
objects of the sewer and the dissecting-room.

There is another peculiarity in the poem of Dante, which, I think,
deserves notice. Ancient mythology has hardly ever been successfully
interwoven with modern poetry. One class of writers have introduced the
fabulous deities merely as allegorical representatives of love, wine,
or wisdom. This necessarily renders their works tame and cold. We may
sometimes admire their ingenuity; but with what interest can we read
of beings of whose personal existence the writer does not suffer us
to entertain, for a moment, even a conventional belief? Even Spenser's
allegory is scarcely tolerable, till we contrive to forget that Una
signifies innocence, and consider her merely as an oppressed lady under
the protection of a generous knight.

Those writers who have, more judiciously, attempted to preserve the
personality of the classical divinities have failed from a different
cause. They have been imitators, and imitators at a disadvantage.
Euripides and Catullus believed in Bacchus and Cybele as little as we
do. But they lived among men who did. Their imaginations, if not their
opinions, took the colour of the age. Hence the glorious inspiration of
the Bacchae and the Atys. Our minds are formed by circumstances: and I
do not believe that it would be in the power of the greatest modern poet
to lash himself up to a degree of enthusiasm adequate to the production
of such works.

Dante, alone among the poets of later times, has been, in this respect,
neither an allegorist nor an imit