eserve of humor, almost of levity. Staggered by the unknown, the mind
opposes it with the homely and the familiar. The northern nations were
too much afraid of ghosts to take them seriously. The sight of one made
a man afraid he should lose his wits if he gave way to his fright. Thus
it has come about that in the sincerest terror of the north there is a
touch of grotesque humor; and this touch we miss in Dante. The hundred
cantos of his poem are unrelieved by a single scene of comedy. The
strain of exalted tragedy is maintained throughout. His jests and wit
are not of the laughing kind. Sometimes they are grim and terrible,
sometimes playful, but always serious and full of meaning. This lack of
humor becomes very palpable in a translation, where it is not disguised
by the transcendent beauty of Dante's style.

There is another difficulty peculiar to the translating of Dante into
English. English is essentially a diffuse and prodigal language. The
great English writers have written with a free hand, prolific,
excursive, diffuse. Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir Walter Scott,
Robert Browning, all the typical writers of English, have been
many-worded. They have been men who said everything that came into their
heads, and trusted to their genius to make their writings readable. The
eighteenth century in England, with all its striving after classical
precision, has left behind it no great laconic English classic who
stands in the first rank. Our own Emerson is concise enough, but he is
disconnected and prophetic. Dante is not only concise, but logical,
deductive, prone to ratiocination. He set down nothing that he had not
thought of a thousand times, and conned over, arranged, and digested. We
have in English no prototype for such condensation. There is no native
work in the language written in anything which approaches the style of
Dante.

My heavy sleep a sullen thunder broke,
So that I shook myself, springing upright,
Like one awakened by a sudden stroke,
And gazed with fixed eyes and new-rested sight
Slowly about me,--awful privilege,--
To know the place that held me, if I might.
In truth I found myself upon the edge
That girds the valley of the dreadful pit,
Circling the infinite wailing with its ledge.
Dark, deep, and cloudy, to the depths of it
Eye could not probe, and though I bent mine low,
It helped my vain conjecture not a whit.
"Let us go down to the bli