o Dante they _were_ so; the real world,
as it is called, and its facts, was but the threshold to an infinitely
higher Fact of a World. At bottom, the one was as _preter_natural as
the other. Has not each man a soul? He will not only be a spirit, but
is one. To the earnest Dante it is all one visible Fact; he believes
it, sees it; is the Poet of it in virtue of that. Sincerity, I say
again, is the saving merit, now as always.

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic
representation of his Belief about this Universe:--some Critic in a
future 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
everlasting Pity,--all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages had
it, is emblemed there. 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 helples