and even exults. Against the sword of Michael, against the
thunder of Jehovah, against the flaming lake, and the marl burning with
solid fire, against the prospect of an eternity of unintermitted misery,
his spirit bears up unbroken, resting on its own innate energies,
requiring no support from anything external, nor even from hope itself.

To return for a moment to the parallel which we have been attempting to
draw between Milton and Dante, we would add that the poetry of these
great men has in a considerable degree taken its character from their
moral qualities. They are not egotists. They rarely obtrude their
idiosyncrasies on their readers. They have nothing in common with those
modern beggars for fame who extort a pittance from the compassion of the
inexperienced by exposing the nakedness and sores of their minds. Yet
it would be difficult to name two writers whose works have been more
completely, though undesignedly, colored by their personal feelings.

The character of Milton was peculiarly distinguished by loftiness of
spirit; that of Dante by intensity of feeling. In every line of the
Divine Comedy we discern the asperity which is produced by pride
struggling with misery. There is perhaps no work in the world so deeply
and uniformly sorrowful. The melancholy of Dante was no fantastic
caprice. It was not, as far as at this distance of time can be judged,
the effect of external circumstances. It was from within. Neither love
nor glory, neither the conflicts of earth nor the hope of heaven, could
dispel it. It turned every consolation and every pleasure into its own
nature. It resembled that noxious Sardinian soil of which the intense
bitterness is said to have been perceptible even in its honey. His mind
was, in the noble language of the Hebrew poet, "a land of darkness, as
darkness itself, and where the light was as darkness." The gloom of his
character discolors all the passions of men, and all the face of nature,
and tinges with its own livid hue the flowers of Paradise and the
glories of the eternal throne. All the portraits of him are singularly
characteristic. No person can look on the features, noble even to
ruggedness--the dark furrows of the cheek, the haggard and woful stare
of the eye the sullen and contemptuous curve of the lip--and doubt that
they belong to a man too proud and too sensitive to be happy.

Milton was, like Dante, a statesman and a lover; and, like Dante, he had
been unfortunate in amb