the _Inferno_ to the two other parts of the Divine _Commedia_. Such
preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and
is like to be a transient feeling. The _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_,
especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent than
it. It is a noble thing that _Purgatorio_, "Mountain of Purification;"
an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If sin is so fatal,
and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is
man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beautiful how
Dante works it out. The _tremolar dell' onde_, that "trembling" of the
ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the
wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood. Hope has now dawned;
never-dying Hope, if in company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure
sojourn of demons and reprobate is underfoot; a soft breathing of
penitence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. "Pray
for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to him. "Tell my
Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Giovanna; "I think her mother
loves me no more!" They toil painfully up by that winding steep, "bent
down like corbels of a building," some of them,--crushed together so
"for the sin of pride;" yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons,
they shall have reached the top, which is heaven's gate, and by Mercy
shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed;
the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises, when
one soul has perfected repentance and got its sin and misery left
behind! I call all this a noble embodiment of a true noble thought.

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are
indispensable to one another. The _Paradiso_, a kind of inarticulate
music to me, is the redeeming side of the _Inferno_; the _Inferno_
without it were untrue. All three make up the true Unseen World,
as figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing forever
memorable, forever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was perhaps
delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in this
of Dante's; a man _sent_ to sing it, to keep it long memorable. Very
notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-day
reality, into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza, we
find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among things
palpable, indubitable! To Dante