conviction of these truths was no mere matter of belief; it had
the ardor and certainty of faith. They had appeared to him in all
their fulness as a revelation of the Divine wisdom. It was his
work as poet, as poet with a divine commission, to make this
revelation known. His work was a work of faith; it was sacred; to
it both Heaven and Earth had set their hands.

To this work, as I have said, the definiteness and the limits of
the generally accepted theory of the Universe gave the required
frame. The very narrowness of this scheme made Dante's design
practicable. He had had the experience of a man on earth. He had
been lured by false objects of desire from the pursuit of the
true good. But Divine Grace, in the form of Beatrice, who had of
old on earth led him aright, now intervened and sent to his aid
Virgil, who, as the type of Human Reason, should bring him safe
through Hell, showing to him the eternal consequences of sin, and
then should conduct him, penitent, up the height of Purgatory,
till on its summit, in the Earthly Paradise, Beatrice should
appear once more to him. Thence she, as the type of that
knowledge through which comes the love of God, should lead him,
through the Heavens up to the Empyrean, to the consummation of
his course in the actual vision of God.


AIDS TO THE STUDY OF THE DIVINE COMEDY.

The Essay by Mr. Lowell, to which I have already referred (Dante,
Lowell's Prose Works, vol. iv.) is the best introduction to the
study of the poem. It should be read and re-read.