lino is to Lear what a single
fire-freighted cloud that discharges five or six terrific strokes is
to a night-long tempest, wherein the thundering heavens gape with a
hundred flashes.

All the personages of Dante's poem (unless we regard himself as one)
are spirits. Shakespeare, throughout his many works, gives only a few
glimpses into the world beyond the grave; but how grandly by these few
is the imagination expanded. Clarence's dream, "lengthened after
life," in which he passes "the melancholy flood," is almost
super-Dantesque, concentrating in a few ejaculative lines a fearful
foretaste of trans-earthly torment for a bad life on earth. And the
great ghost in "Hamlet," when you read of him, how shadowy real!
Dante's representation of disembodied humanity is too pagan, too
palpable, not ghostly enough, not spiritualized with hope and awe.

Profound, awakening, far-stretching, much enfolding, thought-breeding
thoughts, that can only grow in the soil of pure, large sensibilities,
and by them are cast up in the heave and glow of inward motion, to be
wrought by intellect and shaped in the light of the beautiful,--of
these, which are the test of poetic greatness, Dante, if we may
venture to say so, has not more or brighter examples than Milton, and
not so many as Goethe; while of such passages, compactly embodying as
they do the finer insights of a poetic mind, there are more in a
single one of the greater tragedies of Shakespeare, than in all the
three books of the "Divina Commedia."

Juxtaposition beside Shakespeare, even if it bring out the
superiorities of the English bard, is the highest honor paid to any
other great poet. Glory enough is it if admiration can lift Dante so
high as to take him into the same look that beholds Shakespeare; what
though the summit of the mighty Englishman shine alone in the sky, and
the taller giant carry up towards heaven a larger bulk and more varied
domains. The traveler, even if he come directly from wondering
at Mont Blanc in its sublime presence, will yet stand with earnest
delight before the majesty of the Yungfrau and the Eigher.

But it is time to speak of Dante in English.

"It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible, that you might
discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as to seek to
transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet."
Thus writes a great poet, Shelley, in his beautiful "Defense of
Poetry." But have we not in modern tongue