gar seem dreams only.
Thus Homer, the Greek tragedians, Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and
Goethe, have hidden all that is chiefly serviceable in their work, and
in all the various literature they absorbed and re-embodied, under types
which have rendered it quite useless to the multitude. What is worse,
the two primal declarers of moral discovery, Homer and Plato, are partly
at issue; for Plato's logical power quenched his imagination, and he
became incapable of understanding the purely imaginative element either
in poetry or painting: he therefore somewhat overrates the pure
discipline of passionate art in song and music, and misses that of
meditative art. There is, however, a deeper reason for his distrust of
Homer. His love of justice, and reverently religious nature, made him
dread, as death, every form of fallacy; but chiefly, fallacy respecting
the world to come (his own myths being only symbolic exponents of a
rational hope). We shall perhaps now every day discover more clearly how
right Plato was in this, and feel ourselves more and more wonderstruck
that men such as Homer and Dante (and, in an inferior sphere, Milton),
not to speak of the great sculptors and painters of every age, have
permitted themselves, though full of all nobleness and wisdom, to coin
idle imaginations of the mysteries of eternity, and guide the faiths of
the families of the earth by the courses of their own vague and
visionary arts: while the indisputable truths of human life and duty,
respecting which they all have but one voice, lie hidden behind these
veils of phantasy, unsought, and often unsuspected. I will gather
carefully, out of Dante and Homer, what, in this kind, bears on our
subject, in its due place; the first broad intention of their symbols
may be sketched at once.

88. The rewards of a worthy use of riches, subordinate to other ends,
are shown by Dante in the fifth and sixth orbs of Paradise; for the
punishment of their unworthy use, three places are assigned; one for the
avaricious and prodigal whose souls are lost, (_Hell_, canto 7); one for
the avaricious and prodigal whose souls are capable of purification,
(_Purgatory_, canto 19); and one for the usurers, of whom _none_ can be
redeemed (_Hell_, canto 17). The first group, the largest in all hell
("gente piu che altrove troppa," compare Virgil's "quae maxima turba"),
meet in contrary currents, _as the_ _waves of Charybdis_, casting
weights at each other from opposite