insincere and offensive thing.

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his 'Divine Comedy' that
it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there
is a _canto fermo_; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his
simple _terza rima_, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along
naturally with a sort of _lilt_. But I add, that it could not be
otherwise; for the essence and material of the work are themselves
rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes it
musical;--go _deep_ enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward
symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it,
proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the
character of music. The three kingdoms, _Inferno_, _Purgatorio_,
_Paradiso_, look-out on one another like compartments of a great
edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled-up there, stern,
solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the
_sincerest_ of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the
measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts;
and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people
of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, "_Eccovi l'
nom ch' e stato all' Inferno_" (See, there is the man that was in
Hell). Ah yes, he had been in Hell;--in Hell enough, in long severe
sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been.
Commedias that come-out _divine_ are not accomplished otherwise.
Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the
daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;--true _effort_,
in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought.
In all ways we are "to become perfect through suffering."--But as I
say, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has
all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made
him "lean" for many years. Not the general whole only; every
compartment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth,
into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its
place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the
soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the Middle Ages, rendered
forever rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense
one: but a task which is _done_.

Perhaps one would say, intensity, with the much that depends on it, is
the prevailing character of Dante's geniu