remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a sentence
musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is

something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word and
idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song: we said before, it

was the Heroic of Speech! All _old_ Poems, Homer's and the rest, are
authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are;

that whatsoever is not _sung_ is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose
cramped into jingling lines,--to the great injury of the grammar, to the

great grief of the reader, for most part! What we wants to get at is the
_thought_ the man had, if he had any: why should he twist it into jingle,

if he _could_ speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart of him is
rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him, according to

Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his
thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a

Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,--whose speech is Song.
Pretenders to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is for

most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business, that of
reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be rhymed;--it ought

to have told us plainly, without any jingle, what it was aiming at. I
would advise all men who _can_ speak their thought, not to sing it; to

understand that, in a serious time, among serious men, there is no vocation
in them for singing it. Precisely as we love the true song, and are

charmed by it as by something divine, so shall we hate the false song, and
account it a mere wooden noise, a thing hollow, superfluous, altogether an

insincere and offensive thing.
I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his _Divine Comedy_ that it

is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there is a
_canto fermo_; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple _terza

rima_, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort
of _lilt_. But I add, that it could not be otherwise; for the essence and

material of the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion
and sincerity, makes it musical;--go _deep_ enough, there is music

everywhere. A true inward symmetry, what one calls an architectural
harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all: architectural; which also

partakes of the character of music. The three kingdoms, _Inferno_,
_Purgatorio_, _Paradiso_, look out on one another like compartments of a

great edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern,
solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the _sincerest_

of all Poems; sincerity, here too,, we find to be the measure of worth. It
came deep out of the author's heart of hearts; and it goes deep, and

through long generations, into ours. The people of Verona, when they saw
him on the streets, used to say, "_Eccovi l' uom ch' e stato all' Inferno_,

See, there is the man that was in Hell!" Ah yes, he had been in Hell;--in
Hell enough, in long severe sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is

pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come out _divine_ are not
accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue

itself, is it not the daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black
whirlwind;--true _effort_, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free

himself: that is Thought. In all ways we are "to become perfect through
_suffering_."--_But_, as I say, no work known to me is so elaborated as

this of Dante's. It has all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of
his soul. It had made him "lean" for many years. Not the general whole

only; every compartment of it is worked out, with intenseearnestness, into
truth, into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its

place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the soul of
Dante, and in this the soul of the middle ages, rendered forever

rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense one: but a
task which is _done_.

Perhaps one would say, _intensity_, with the much that depends on it, is
the prevailingcharacter of Dante's genius. Dante does not come before us

as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind: it
is partly the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own

nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred itself into fiery
emphasis and depth. He is world-great not because he is worldwide, but

because he is world-deep. Through all objects he pierces as it were down
into the heart of Being. I know nothing so intense as Dante. Consider,

for example, to begin with the outermost development of his intensity,
consider how he paints. He has a great power of vision; seizes the very

type of a thing; presents that and nothing more. You remember that first
view he gets of the Hall of Dite: _red_ pinnacle, red-hot cone of iron

glowing through the dim immensity of gloom;--so vivid, so distinct, visible
at once and forever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante.

There is a brevity, an abruptprecision in him: Tacitus is not briefer,
more condensed; and then in Dante it seems a natural condensation,

spontaneous to the man. One smiting word; and then there is silence,
nothing more said. His silence is more eloquent than words. It is strange

with what a sharp decisive grace he snatches the true likeness of a matter:
cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the blustering giant,

collapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is "as the sails sink, the mast being
suddenly broken." Or that poor Brunetto Latini, with the _cotto aspetto_,

"face _baked_," parched brown and lean; and the "fiery snow" that falls on
them there, a "fiery snow without wind," slow, deliberate, never-ending!

Or the lids of those Tombs; square sarcophaguses, in that silent
dim-burning Hall, each with its Soul in torment; the lids laid open there;

they are to be shut at the Day of Judgment, through Eternity. And how
Farinata rises; and how Cavalcante falls--at hearing of his Son, and the

past tense "_fue_"! The very movements in Dante have something brief;
swift, decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his

genius this sort of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man,
so silent, passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent "pale

rages," speaks itself in these things.
For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a man,

it comes like all else from the essentialfaculty of him; it is
physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a

likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of doing
it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could not have

discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it, unless he had,
what we may call, _sympathized_ with it,--had sympathy in him to bestow on

objects. He must have been _sincere_ about it too; sincere and
sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the likeness of any

object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about
all objects. And indeed may we not say that intellectaltogether expresses

itself in this power of discerning what an object is? Whatsoever of
faculty a man's mind may have will come out here. Is it even of business,

a matter to be done? The gifted man is he who _sees_ the essential point,
and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage: it is his faculty too, the

man of business's faculty, that he discern the true _likeness_, not the
false superficial one, of the thing he has got to work in. And how much of

_morality_ is in the kind of insight we get of anything; "the eye seeing in
all things what it brought with it the faculty of seeing"! To the mean eye

all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.
Raphael, the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal.

No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the
commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with him.

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as of
fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is every way noble, and

the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what qualities in
that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of eternal black. A

small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into our very heart of
hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: _della bella persona, che mi fu

tolta_; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a solace that _he_ will
never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these _alti guai_. And the

racking winds, in that _aer bruno_, whirl them away again, to wail
forever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friend of this poor Francesca's

father; Francesca herself may have sat upon the Poet's knee, as a bright
innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigor of law: it

is so Nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a
paltry notion is that of his _Divine Comedy's_ being a poor splenetic

impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into Hell whom he could not be
avenged upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was

in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know
rigor cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly,

egoistic,--sentimentality, or little better. I know not in the world an
affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling,

longing, pitying love: like the wail of AEolian harps, soft, soft; like a
child's young heart;--and then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These

longings of his towards his Beatrice; their meeting together in the
_Paradiso_; his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been

purified by death so long, separated from him so far:--one likens it to the
song of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the