child's young heart;--and then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These
longings of his towards his Beatrice; their meeting together in the
_Paradiso_; his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been
purified by death so long, separated from him so far:--one likens it to the
song of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the
very purest, that ever came out of a human soul.

For the _intense_ Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the
essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too as
reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity. Morally
great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of all. His scorn,
his grief are as transcendent as his love;--as indeed, what are they but
the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love? "_A Dio spiacenti ed a' nemici
sui_, Hateful to God and to the enemies of God: "lofty scorn, unappeasable
silent reprobation and aversion; "_Non ragionam di lor_, We will not speak
of _them_, look only and pass." Or think of this; "They have not the
_hope_ to die, _Non han speranza di morte_." One day, it had risen sternly
benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting,
worn as he was, would full surely _die_; "that Destiny itself could not
doom him not to die." Such words are in this man. For rigor, earnestness
and depth, he is not to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his
parallel we must go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique
Prophets there.

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the
_Inferno_ to the two other parts of the Divine _Commedia_. Such preference
belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and is like to be a
transient feeling. Thc _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_, especially the former,
one would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing
that _Purgatorio_, "Mountain of Purification;" an emblem of the noblest