suggestion.
Thus, describing the darkened head of Satan, Milton says,--

"As when the sun new risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air,
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations,"

Setting aside the epithets "horizontal" and "disastrous," which are
poetically imaginative, the likening of Satan to the sun seen through
a mist, or in eclipse, is a direct, parallel comparison that aids us
to see Satan; and it is in such, immediate, not mediate,--not
involving likeness between physical and mental qualities, but merely
between physical, not between subtle, relations,--that Dante chiefly
deals, showing imaginative fertility, helpful, needful to the poet,
but different from, and altogether inferior to, poetic imagination.
The mind attains to the height of poetic imagination when the
intellect, urged by the purer sensibilities in alliance with
aspiration for the perfect, exerts its imaginative power to the
utmost, and, as the result of this exertion, discovers a thought or
image which, from its originality, fitness, and beauty, gives to the
reader a new delight. Of this, the lordliest mental exhibition, there
is a sovereign example in the words wherewith Milton concludes the
passage--

"and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs."

This fills the mind with the terror he wishes his Satan to inspire;
this gives its greatness to the passage.

Dante, by the distinctness of his outline, addresses himself more to
the reader's senses and perception; Milton rouses his higher
imaginative capacity. In the whole "Inferno," is there a sentence so
aglow as this line and a half of "Paradise Lost"?

"And the torrid clime
Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with fire."

Or is there in Dante any sound so loud and terrible as that shout of
Milton's demon-host--

"That tore Hell's concave, and beyond
Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night"?

Here the unity of his theme stands Milton in stead for grandeur and
breadth.

Dante is copious in similes. Such copiousness by no means proves
poetic genius; and a superior poet may have less command of similes
than one inferior to him. Wordsworth has much less of this command
than Moore. But when a poet does use similes, he will be likely often
to put of his best into them, for they are captivating instruments and
facilities for poetic expansion. When a poet is in warm sympathy wit