like a dead weight upon the mind; a benumbing stupor, a breathless awe,
from the intensity of the impression; a terrible obscurity, like that
which oppresses us in dreams; an identity of interest, which moulds
every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the
passions and imaginations of the human soul,--that make amends for all
other deficiencies. The immediate objects he presents to the mind are
not much in themselves, they want grandeur, beauty, and order; but they
become every thing by the force of the character he impresses upon them.
His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates,
instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantage even of the
nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples the
shades of death, and broods over the silent air. He is the severest of
all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the most opposite to the
flowery and glittering; who relies most on his own power, and the sense
of it in others, and who leaves most room to the imagination of his
readers. Dante's only endeavour is to interest; and he interests by
exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed.
He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been
created; but he seizes on the attention, by shewing us the effect they
produce on his feelings; and his poetry accordingly gives the same
thrilling and overwhelming sensation, which is caught by gazing on the
face of a person who has seen some object of horror. The improbability
of the events, the abruptness and monotony in the Inferno, are
excessive: but the interest never flags, from the continued earnestness
of the author's mind. Dante's great power is in combining internal
feelings with external objects. Thus the gate of hell, on which that
withering inscription is written, seems to be endowed with speech and
consciousness, and to utter its dread warning, not without a sense of
mortal woes. This author habitually unites the absolutely local and
individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the