, whirl them away again, to
wail forever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friend of this poor
Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon the Poet's knee,
as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite
rigor of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that she
was made. What a paltry notion is that of his _Divine Comedy's_ being a
poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into Hell whom
he could not be avenged upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity, tender
as a mother's, was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a
man who does not know rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be
cowardly, egoistic,--sentimentality, or little better. I know not in
the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a
trembling, longing, pitying love: like the wail of AEolian harps, soft,
soft; like a child's young heart;--and then that stern, sore-saddened
heart! These longings of his towards his Beatrice; their meeting
together in the _Paradiso_; his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes,
her that had been purified by death so long, separated from him so
far:--one likens it to the song of angels; it is among the purest
utterances of affection, perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of
a human soul.

For the _intense_ Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the
essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too
as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity. Morally
great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of all. His
scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;--as indeed, what are
they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love? "_A Dio spiacenti ed
a' nemici sui_, Hateful to God and to the enemies of God:" lofty scorn,
unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; "_Non ragionam di lor_, We
will not speak of _them_, look only and pass." Or think of this; "They
have not the _hope_ to die, _Non han speranza di morte_." One day,
it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he,
wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full surely _die_; "that
Destiny itself could not doom him not to die." Such words are in this
man. For rigor, earnestness and depth, he is not to be paralleled in the
modern world; to seek his parallel we must go into the Hebrew Bible, and
live with the antique Prophets there.

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring