man of business's faculty, that he discern the true _likeness_, not the
false superficial one, of the thing he has got to work in. And how much of
_morality_ is in the kind of insight we get of anything; "the eye seeing in
all things what it brought with it the faculty of seeing"! To the mean eye
all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.
Raphael, the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal.
No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the
commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with him.

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as of
fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is every way noble, and
the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what qualities in
that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of eternal black. A
small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into our very heart of
hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: _della bella persona, che mi fu
tolta_; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a solace that _he_ will
never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these _alti guai_. And the
racking winds, in that _aer bruno_, whirl them away again, to wail
forever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friend of this poor Francesca's
father; Francesca herself may have sat upon the Poet's knee, as a bright
innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigor of law: it
is so Nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a
paltry notion is that of his _Divine Comedy's_ being a poor splenetic
impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into Hell whom he could not be
avenged upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was
in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know
rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly,
egoistic,--sentimentality, or little better. I know not in the world an
affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling,
longing, pitying love: like the wail of AEolian harps, soft, soft; like a