tal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in
Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act.
It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The _tremolar dell' onde_,
that "trembling" of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of
morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an
altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company
still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of daemons and reprobates
is underfoot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher,
to the Throne of Mercy itself. "Pray for me," the denizens of that
Mount of Pain all say to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me, my
daughter Giovanna; I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil
painfully up by that winding steep, "bent-down like corbels of a
building," some of them,--crushed together so "for the sin of pride";
yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached
the top, which is Heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted
in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain
shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises when one soul has
perfected repentance and got its sin and misery left behind! I call
all this a noble embodiment of a true, noble thought.

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are
indispensable to one another. The 'Paradiso,' a kind of inarticulate
music to me, is the redeeming side of the 'Inferno'; the 'Inferno'
without it were untrue. All three make-up the true Unseen World, as
figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing forever
memorable, forever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was
perhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in
this of Dante's; a man _sent_ to sing it, to keep it long memorable.
Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-day
reality, into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza, we
find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among
things palpable, indubitable! To Dante they _were_ so; the real world,
as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely
higher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as _preter_natural as
the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, but
is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes
it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say
again, is the saving merit, now as