lear faith in the _things_, so
that a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the other
non-extant; what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!

Nay here in these pages, such as they are, have we not two mere Poets,
if not deified, yet we may say beatified? Shakspeare and Dante are
Saints of Poetry; really, if we will think of it, _canonised_, so that
it is impiety to meddle with them. The unguided instinct of the world,
working across all these perverse impediments, has arrived at such
result. Dante and Shakspeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, in
a kind of royal solitude; none equal, none second to them: in the
general feeling of the world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory as
of complete perfection, invests these two. They _are_ canonised,
though no Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it! Such, in spite of
every perverting influence, in the most unheroic times, is still our
indestructible reverence for heroism.--We will look a little at these
Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakspeare: what little it is
permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will most fitly arrange
itself in that fashion.

* * * * *

Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his
Book; yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as it
were, irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering,
sorrowstricken man, not much note was taken of him while he lived; and
the most of that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes.
It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living here. After
all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The
Book;--and one might add that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto,
which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine,
whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all faces
that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, with
the simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain, the
known victory which is also deathless;--significant of the whole
history of Dante! I think it is the mournfulest face that ever was
painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face.
There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle
affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into sharp
contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain. A soft
ethereal soul looking-out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as