they _were_ so; the real world, as it
is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely higher
Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as _preternatural_ as the other.
Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, but is one. To
the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes it, sees it;
is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say again, is the
saving merit, now as always.

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic
representation of his Belief about this Universe:--some Critic in a
future age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased
altogether to think as Dante did, may find this too all an "Allegory,"
perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest,
of the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge world-wide
architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to
be the two polar elements of this Creation, on which it all turns;
that these two differ not by preferability of one to the other, but by
incompatibility absolute and infinite; that the one is excellent and
high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as Gehenna and the
Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence, with everlasting
Pity,--all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages had it, is
emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the other day, with
what entire truth of purpose; how unconscious of any embleming! Hell,
Purgatory, Paradise: these things were not fashioned as emblems; was
there, in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of their being
emblems! Were they not indubitable awful facts; the whole heart of man
taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhere confirming them?
So is it always in these things. Men do not believe an Allegory. The
future Critic, whatever his new thought may be, who considers this
of Dante to have been all got up as an Allegory, will commit one sore
mistake!--Paganism we recognized as a veracious expression of the
earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the Universe; veracious, true
once, and still not without worth for us. But mark here the difference
of Paganism and Christianism; one great difference. Paganism emblemed
chiefly the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combinations,
vicissitudes of things and men in this world; Christianism emblemed
the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous
nature: a rude helpless utterance