The shape of Satan we had left behind, Who doth not understand what we had past, Solid realism is the tone of Dante's Hell; his Purgatory is still of earth, but surrounded by a celestial atmosphere; his Heaven is compounded almost exclusively of light and music. Think, then, what almost superhuman resourcefulness is required to diversify the stages of his journey through the skies! In one place, dancing rings of bright spirits; in another, a ladder of light, extending beyond the range of vision, with souls flitting over it; in still another, a vast army of militant ghosts collected in the form of a gigantic fiery cross, like two Milky Ways intersecting at right angles, and all alive with song. Elsewhere a host of shining souls takes the form of an Eagle, symbol of the Holy Roman Empire, which flaps its wings like a real bird, and speaks with a single voice. Methought I heard a river murmuring Adown its clear descent from stone to stone, Along the neck, and in the tuneful reed Dante's first experience of heaven is his rapid ascent, with Beatrice, from the Garden of Eden to the into whose substance they penetrate. moon, The inborn thirst for Heaven, which never dies, And quicker than a bolt can fly and light I saw myself transported to a site Where something wonderful mine eyes did meet. Now turned to me as glad as she was sweet: "Thank God within thy heart," she said, "who thus Hath carried us his lowest star to greet." Methought a heavy cloud envelopt us, Solid but gleaming, limpid yet opaque, Both her and me, as water takes a ray Now Beatrice, with her disciple, is about to flash from the moon to the planet Mercury, and stands gazing up toward the Empyrean: My lady spake as I to write contrive; Like arrowhead that hits the target's dot That, when she stopt within the planet bright, Then what became of me, whose natural mood Come swimming up, when falleth from above Approaching us, and each appeared to cry: Lo! here is one who shall increase our love!" In this conception of things never seen by mortal eye, Dante goes beyond the usual domain of poets; but he passes even further. The pictures thus far drawn, though novel in their totality, are made of materials known to the senses. But in his figures of celestial joy, his "smile of the universe," in his symbols of Grace and of God, he transcends the bounds of description, conveying, through means necessarily finite and material, the impression of immaterial infinity. This is suggestion, not painting. It is "such stuff as dreams are made on"-dreams, which faintly linger when we first awake, and which we afterwards vainly struggle to recall. So slumber breaks, when smites the covered eye And, breaking, quivers ere it wholly die. A man was I who dimly catches sight One more dream-passage I shall cite in conclusion. reduce to words his ineffable concept; it tells what we, on closing the Paradise, think we have felt. E'en as a man who seeth in his sleep, Whose mood still lingers, when the dream is done, LECTURE VI CONCEPTION AT the close of the Vita Nuova — that wonderfully discreet record of Dante's emotional life under the influence of Beatrice a strange, fascinating, baffling combination of self-revelation and reticence - we find a sonnet which tells how the poet's thought, in the form of a sigh, soars through all the revolving skies, and, piercing the outermost and greatest, leaving the world of matter behind, enters Paradise, where it beholds the soul of Beatrice in glory. Beyond the sphere that all-encircling sways A sigh, escaping from my heart, doth fare. And on her light, which shines beyond compare, 'Tis all so strange that, when it tells me this, I cannot comprehend, it puzzles so The mournful heart which ever bids it tell. It speaketh of that gentle one, I know, Because it often nameth Beatrice; And that, dear ladies mine, I hear full well. "After this sonnet," continues Dante, "there appeared to me a marvelous vision, wherein I saw |