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 of the first Thought of men,--the chief recognized
virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous
nature, but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect
only!--

And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a very
strange way, found a voice. The _Divina Commedia_ is of Dante's writing;
yet in truth it belongs to ten Christian centuries, only the finishing of
it is Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, the smith with that metal
of his, with these tools, with these cunning methods,--how little of all he
does is properly _his_ work! All past inventive men work there with
him;--as indeed with all of us, in all things. Dante is the spokesman of
the Middle Ages; the Thought they lived by stands here, in everlasting
music. These sublime ideas of his, terrible and beautiful, are the fruit
of the Christian Meditation of all the good men who had gone before him.
Precious they; but also is not he precious? Much, had not he spoken, would
have been dumb; not dead, yet living voiceless.

On the whole, is it not an utterance, this mystic Song, at once of one of
the greatest human souls, and of the highest thing that Europe had hitherto
realized for itself? Christianism, as Dante sings it, is another than
Paganism in the rude Norse mind; another than "Bastard Christianism" half-
articulately spoken in the Arab Desert, seven hundred years before!--The
noblest _idea_ made _real_ hitherto among men, is sung, and emblemed forth