describes as driven by the wind without rest are only dimly seen in the
background. The horrors of hell are shown only in the anguish of those
faces, in the despairing languor of the attitude, which not even mutual
love can lighten. The love which made them one in guilt, one in
condemnation, is stronger than death, stronger than hell; but it cannot
bring peace and joy to these souls shut out from heaven and God.

"Se fosse amico il Re dell' universo,
Noi pregheremmo."

But even prayer is denied to him who feels that he has not God for a
friend. There is no mark of physical torture; it is pure spiritual
suffering,--restless, aimless weariness,--the loss of hope; it is
death,--and love demands life. How strangely appropriate is this
punishment of spirits driven hither and thither by the winds, with no
hope of rest, to those who reject the firm anchorage of duty and
principle, and allow themselves to float at the mercy of their impulses
and passions! The overpowering compassion and sympathy of the poets is
shown in their earnest faces. Neither here, nor in the well-known "Dante
and Beatrice," which is too familiar to need description, does Scheffer
quite do justice to our ideal of the sublime poet of Heaven and Hell;
but neither do the portraits which remain of him. The picture was first
exhibited in 1835. As it had suffered very much in 1850, Scheffer
painted a repetition of it, with a few slight alterations, in which,
however, his progress in his art during twenty years was very evident.
This copy is very far superior to the engraving.

About this period Scheffer seems to have wandered a little from the true
mission of Art, and to have esteemed it her province to represent
abstract theological truths. His religious feeling seems to have become