age, like those Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased altogether

to think as Dante did, may find this too all an "Allegory," perhaps an idle
Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or sublimest, of the soul of

Christianity. It expresses, as in huge world-wide architectural emblems,
how the Christian Dante felt Good and Evil to be the two polar elements of

this Creation, on which it all turns; that these two differ not by
preferability of one to the other, but by incompatibility absolute and

infinite; that the one is excellent and high as light and Heaven, the other
hideous, black as Gehenna and the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet

with Penitence, with lasting" target="_blank" title="a.永久的，无尽的">everlasting Pity,--all Christianism, as Dante and the
Middle Ages had it, is emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the

other day, with what entire truth of purpose; how unconscious of any
embleming! Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these things were not fashioned as

emblems; was there, in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of
their being emblems! Were they not indubitable awful facts; the whole

heart of man taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhere
confirming them? So is it always in these things. Men do not believe an

Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his new thought may be, who
considers this of Dante to have been all got up as an Allegory, will commit

one sore mistake!--Paganism we recognized as a veracious expression of the
earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the Universe; veracious, true

once, and still not without worth for us. But mark here the difference of
Paganism and Christianism; one great difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly

the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combinations,
vicissitudes of things and men in this world; Christianism emblemed the Law

of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a
rude helplessutterance of the first Thought of men,--the chief recognized

virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous
nature, but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect

only!--
And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a very

strange way, found a voice. The _Divina Commedia_ is of Dante's writing;
yet in truth it belongs to ten Christian centuries, only the finishing of

it is Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, the smith with that metal
of his, with these tools, with these cunning methods,--how little of all he

does is properly _his_ work! All past inventive men work there with
him;--as indeed with all of us, in all things. Dante is the spokesman of

the Middle Ages; the Thought they lived by stands here, in lasting" target="_blank" title="a.永久的，无尽的">everlasting
music. These sublime ideas of his, terrible and beautiful, are the fruit

of the Christian Meditation of all the good men who had gone before him.
Precious they; but also is not he precious? Much, had not he spoken, would

have been dumb; not dead, yet living voiceless.
On the whole, is it not an utterance, this mystic Song, at once of one of

the greatest human souls, and of the highest thing that Europe had hitherto
realized for itself? Christianism, as Dante sings it, is another than

Paganism in the rude Norse mind; another than "Bastard Christianism" half-
articulately spoken in the Arab Desert, seven hundred years before!--The

noblest _idea_ made _real_ hitherto among men, is sung, and emblemed forth
abidingly, by one of the noblest men. In the one sense and in the other,

are we not right glad to possess it? As I calculate, it may last yet for
long thousands of years. For the thing that is uttered from the inmost

parts of a man's soul, differs altogether from what is uttered by the outer
part. The outer is of the day, under the empire of mode; the outer passes

away, in swift endless changes; the inmost is the same yesterday, to-day
and forever. True souls, in all generations of the world, who look on this

Dante, will find a brotherhood in him; the deep sincerity of his thoughts,
his woes and hopes, will speak likewise to their sincerity; they will feel

that this Dante too was a brother. Napoleon in Saint Helena is charmed
with the genial veracity of old Homer. The oldest Hebrew Prophet, under a

vesture the most diverse from ours, does yet, because he speaks from the
heart of man, speak to all men's hearts. It is the one sole secret of

continuing long memorable. Dante, for depth of sincerity, is like an
antique Prophet too; his words, like theirs, come from his very heart. One

need not wonder if it were predicted that his Poem might be the most
enduring thing our Europe has yet made; for nothing so endures as a truly

spoken word. All cathedrals, pontificalities, brass and stone, and outer
arrangement never so lasting, are brief in comparison to an unfathomable

heart-song like this: one feels as if it might survive, still of
importance to men, when these had all sunk into new irrecognizable

combinations, and had ceased individually to be. Europe has made much;
great cities, great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds, bodies of opinion and

practice: but it has made little of the class of Dante's Thought. Homer
yet _is_ veritably present face to face with every open soul of us; and

Greece, where is _it_? Desolate for thousands of years; away, vanished; a
bewildered heap of stones and rubbish, the life and existence of it all

gone. Like a dream; like the dust of King Agamemnon! Greece was; Greece,
except in the _words_ it spoke, is not.

The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his "uses." A human
soul who has once got into that primal element of _Song_, and sung forth

fitly somewhat therefrom, has worked in the _depths_ of our existence;
feeding through long times the life-roots of all excellent human things

whatsoever,--in a way that "utilities" will not succeed well in
calculating! We will not estimate the Sun by the quantity of gaslight it

saves us; Dante shall be invaluable, or of no value. One remark I may
make: the contrast in this respect between the Hero-Poet and the

Hero-Prophet. In a hundred years, Mahomet, as we saw, had his Arabians at
Grenada and at Delhi; Dante's Italians seem to be yet very much where they

were. Shall we say, then, Dante's effect on the world was small in
comparison? Not so: his arena is far more restricted; but also it is far

nobler, clearer;--perhaps not less but more important. Mahomet speaks to
great masses of men, in the coarsedialect adapted to such; a dialect

filled with inconsistencies, crudities, follies: on the great masses alone
can he act, and there with good and with evil strangely blended. Dante

speaks to the noble, the pure and great, in all times and places. Neither
does he grow obsolete, as the other does. Dante burns as a pure star,

fixed there in the firmament, at which the great and the high of all ages
kindle themselves: he is the possession of all the chosen of the world for

uncounted time. Dante, one calculates, may long survive Mahomet. In this
way the balance may be made straight again.

But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on the world, by
what _we_ can judge of their effect there, that a man and his work are

measured. Effect? Influence? Utility? Let a man _do_ his work; the
fruit of it is the care of Another than he. It will grow its own fruit;

and whether embodied in Caliph Thrones and Arabian Conquests, so that it
"fills all Morning and Evening Newspapers," and all Histories, which are a

kind of distilled Newspapers; or not embodied so at all;--what matters
that? That is not the real fruit of it! The Arabian Caliph, in so far

only as he did something, was something. If the great Cause of Man, and
Man's work in God's Earth, got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then

no matter how many scimetars he drew, how many gold piasters pocketed, and
what uproar and blaring he made in this world,--_he_ was but a

loud-sounding inanity and futility; at bottom, he _was_ not at all. Let us
honor the great empire of _Silence_, once more! The boundless treasury

which we do not jingle in our pockets, or count up and present before men!
It is perhaps, of all things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in these

loud times.--
As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically the

Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner
Life; so Shakspeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of our

Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, humors, ambitions,
what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at the world, men then had.

As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece; so in Shakspeare and Dante,
after thousands of years, what our modern Europe was, in Faith and in

Practice, will still be legible. Dante has given us the Faith or soul;
Shakspeare, in a not less noble way, has given us the Practice or body.

This latter also we were to have; a man was sent for it, the man
Shakspeare. Just when that chivalry way of life had reached its last

finish, and was on the point of breaking down into slow or swift
dissolution, as we now see it everywhere, this other sovereign Poet, with

his seeing eye, with his perennial singing voice, was sent to take note of
it, to give long-enduring record of it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce

as the central fire of the world; Shakspeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as
the Sun, the upper light of the world. Italy produced the one world-voice;

we English had the honor of producing the other.
Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to us. I

think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is this