conception of that age. If sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so
rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the
grand Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The
_tremolar dell' onde_, that "trembling" of the ocean-waves, under the first
pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of
an altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company
still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of demons and reprobate is
underfoot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher, to the
Throne of Mercy itself. "Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain
all say to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Giovanna;
"I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil painfully up by that
winding steep, "bent down like corbels of a building," some of
them,--crushed together so "for the sin of pride;" yet nevertheless in
years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached the top, which is
heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of
all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a
psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected repentance and got its
sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble embodiment of a true
noble thought.

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are
indispensable to one another. The _Paradiso_, a kind of inarticulate music
to me, is the redeeming side of the _Inferno_; the _Inferno_ without it
were untrue. All three make up the true Unseen World, as figured in the
Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing forever memorable, forever true in
the essence of it, to all men. It was perhaps delineated in no human soul
with such depth of veracity as in this of Dante's; a man _sent_ to sing it,
to keep it long memorable. Very notable with what brief simplicity he
passes out of the every-day reality, into the Invisible one; and in the
second or third stanza, we find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and