pathos and the most impressive simplicity, and graceful beauty of all
kinds, and abundant grandeur, can pay (as the reader, I believe, will
think it does even in a prose abstract), for the pangs of moral discord
and absurdity inflicted by the perusal of Dante's poem, it may challenge
competition with any in point of interest. His Heaven, it is true,
though containing both sublime and lovely passages, is not so good as
his Earth. The more unearthly he tried to make it, the less heavenly
it became. When he is content with earth in heaven itself,-when he
literalises a metaphor, and with exquisite felicity finds himself
_arrived there_ in consequence of fixing his eyes on the eyes of
Beatrice, then he is most celestial. But his endeavours to express
degrees of beatitude and holiness by varieties of flame and light,--of
dancing lights, revolving lights, lights of smiles, of stars, of starry
crosses, of didactic letters and sentences, of animal figures made up of
stars full of blessed souls, with saints _forming an eagle's beak_ and
David in its _eye!_--such superhuman attempts become for the most part
tricks of theatrical machinery, on which we gaze with little curiosity
and no respect.

His angels, however, are another matter. Belief was prepared for those
winged human forms, and they furnished him with some of his most
beautiful combinations of the natural with the supernatural. Ginguéné
has remarked the singular variety as well as beauty of Dante's angels.
Milton's, indeed, are commonplace in the comparison. In the eighth canto
of the _Inferno_, the devils insolently refuse the poet and his guide an
entrance into the city of Dis:--an angel comes sweeping over the Stygian
lake to enforce it; the noise of his wings makes the shores tremble, and
is like a crashing whirlwind such as beats down the trees and sends the
peasants and their herds flying before it. The heavenly messenger, after
rebuking the devils, touches the portals of the city with his wand; they