ancient and modern poetry, may be illustrated by the parallel effects
caused by the contemplation of the Greek or Roman-Greek architecture,
compared with the Gothic. In the Pantheon, the whole is perceived in a
perceived harmony with the parts which compose it; and generally you
will remember that where the parts preserve any distinct individuality,
there simple beauty, or beauty simply, arises; but where the parts melt
undistinguished into the whole, there majestic beauty, or majesty, is
the result. In York Minster, the parts, the grotesques, are in
themselves very sharply distinct and separate, and this distinction and
separation of the parts is counterbalanced only by the multitude and
variety of those parts, by which the attention is bewildered;--whilst
the whole, or that there is a whole produced, is altogether a feeling in
which the several thousand distinct impressions lose themselves as in a
universal solvent. Hence in a Gothic cathedral, as in a prospect from a
mountain's top, there is, indeed, a unity, an awful oneness;--but it is,
because all distinction evades the eye. And just such is the distinction
between the 'Antigone' of Sophocles and the 'Hamlet' of Shakespeare.

The 'Divina Commedia' is a system of moral, political, and theological
truths, with arbitrary personal exemplifications, which are not, in my
opinion, allegorical. I do not even feel convinced that the punishments
in the Inferno are strictly allegorical. I rather take them to have been
in Dante's mind 'quasi'-allegorical, or conceived in analogy to pure
allegory.

I have said, that a combination of poetry with doctrines, is one of the
characteristics of the Christian muse; but I think Dante has not
succeeded in effecting this combination nearly so well as Milton.

This comparative failure of Dante, as also some other peculiarities of