dwell there, as among things palpable, indubitable! To Dante 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