ks of others. The great
sage did not read to imbibe the opinions of others, but to engender
new ones for himself; he did not study to imitate, but to create. It
was the same with Dante; it is the same with every really great man.
His was the first powerful and original mind which, fraught with the
profound and gloomy ideas nourished in seclusion during the middle
ages, came into contact with the brilliant imagery, touching pathos,
and harmonious language of the ancients. Hence his astonishing
greatness. He almost worshipped Virgil, he speaks of him as a species
of god; he mentions Homer as the first of poets. But he did not copy
either the one or the other; he scarcely imitated them. He strove to
rival their brevity and beauty of expression; but he did so in giving
vent to new ideas, in painting new images, in awakening new emotions.
The _Inferno_ is as original as the _Iliad_; incomparably more so than
the _AEneid_. The offspring of originality with originality is a new
and noble creation; of originality with mediocrity, a spurious and
degraded imitation.

Dante paints the spirits of all the generations of men, each in their
circle undergoing their allotted punishment; expiating by suffering
the sins of an upper world. Virgil gave a glimpse, as it were, into
that scene of retribution; Minos and Rhadamanthus passing judgment on
the successive spirits brought before them; the flames of Tartarus,
the rock of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, the vulture gnawing
Prometheus. But with Homer and Virgil, the descent into the infernal
regions was a brief episode; with Dante it was the whole poem. Immense
was the effort of imagination requisite to give variety to such a
subject, to prevent the mind from experiencing weariness amidst the
eternal recurrence of crime and punishment. But the genius of Dante
was equal to the task. His fancy was prodigious; his invention
boundless; his imagination inexhaustible. Fenced in, as he was,
within narrow and gloomy limits by the nature of his subject, his
creative spirit equals that of Homer himself. He has given birth to as
many new ideas in the _Inferno_ and the _Paradiso_, as the Grecian
bard in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_.

Though he had reflected so much and so deeply on the human heart, and
was so perfect a master of all the anatomy of mental suffering,
Dante's mind was essentially descriptive. He was a great painter as
well as a profound thinker; he clothed deep feeling in the garb of the