e told us plainly, without any jingle, what it
was aiming at. I would advise all men who _can_ speak their thought,
not to sing it; to understand that, in a serious time, among serious
men, there is no vocation in them for singing it. Precisely as we love
the true song, and are charmed by it as by something divine, so shall
we hate the false song, and account it a mere wooden noise, a thing
hollow, superfluous, altogether an insincere and offensive thing.

I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his _Divine Comedy_ that
it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there
is a _canto fermo_; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his
simple _terza rima_, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along
naturally with a sort of _lilt_. But I add, that it could not be
otherwise; for the essence and material of the work are themselves
rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes its
musical;--go _deep_ enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward
symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it,
proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the
character of music. The three kingdoms, _Inferno_, _Purgatorio_,
_Paradiso_, look-out on one another like compartments of a great
edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled-up there, stern,
solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the
_sincerest_ of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the
measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts;
and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people
of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, "_Eccovi l'
uom ch' e stato all' Inferno_, See, there is the man that was in
Hell!" Ah, yes, he had been in Hell;--in Hell enough, in long severe
sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been.
Commedias that come-out _divine_ are not accomplished otherwise.
Thought, true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the
daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;--true _effort_,
in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought.
In all ways we are 'to become perfect through _suffering_.'--But, as I
say, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has
all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made
him 'lean' for many years. Not the general whole only; every
compartment of it is worked-out, with intense earne