Although, in an English dress, it is known to most people who pretend to
be cultivated, yet it is not more read than the "Paradise Lost" or the
"Faerie Queene," being too deep and learned for some, and understood by
nobody without a tolerable acquaintance with the Middle Ages, which it
interprets,--the superstitions, the loves, the hatreds, the ideas of
ages which can never more return. All I can do--all that is safe for me
to attempt--is to show the circumstances and conditions in which it was
written, the sentiments which prompted it, its historical results, its
general scope and end, and whatever makes its author stand out to us as
a living man, bearing the sorrows and revelling in the joys of that high
life which gave to him extraordinary moral wisdom, and made him a
prophet and teacher to all generations. He was a man of sorrows, of
resentments, fierce and implacable, but whose "love was as transcendent
as his scorn,"--a man of vast experiences and intense convictions and
superhuman earnestness, despising the world which he sought to elevate,
living isolated in the midst of society, a wanderer and a sage,
meditating constantly on the grandest themes, lost in ecstatic reveries,
familiar with abstruse theories, versed in all the wisdom of his day
and in the history of the past, a believer in God and immortality, in
rewards and punishments, and perpetually soaring to comprehend the
mysteries of existence, and those ennobling truths which constitute the
joy and the hope of renovated and emancipated and glorified spirits in
the realms of eternal bliss. All this is history, and it is history
alone which I seek to teach,--the outward life of a great man, with
glimpses, if I can, of those visions of beauty and truth in which his
soul lived, and which visions and experiences constitute his peculiar
greatness. Dante was not so close an observer of human nature as
Shakspeare, nor so great a painter of human actions as Homer, nor so
learned a scholar as Milton; but his soul was more serious than
either,--he was deeper, more intense than they; while in pathos, in