ame wonderful and heavenly, and
a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this
creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language
was the instrument of their art: 'Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo
scrisse.' The Provencal Trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch,
whose verses are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted
fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love. It is
impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of that beauty
which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain how the
gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred
emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise, and lift
them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. Dante
understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. His
_Vita Nuova_ is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and
language: it is the idealized history of that period, and those
intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis of
Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her
loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to
the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of
modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the judgement
of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the 'Divine Drama',
in the measure of the admiration which they accord to the Hell,
Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting
love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the
ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of
the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of
society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and
superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare,
Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age,
have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in
the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force.
The true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which human
kind is distributed, has become less misunderstood; and if the error
which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two
sexes has been partially recognized in the opinions and institutions
of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which
chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets.

The poetry of Dante may be considered as