that _aer bruno_, whirl them
away again, to wail forever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friend
of this poor Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon
the Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet
also infinite rigour of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante
discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his
_Divine Comedy's_ being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel;
putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged-upon on earth! I
suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother's, was in the heart of any
man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity
either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic,--sentimentality, or
little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of
Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like
the wail of AEolean harps, soft, soft; like a child's young heart;--and
then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of his towards
his Beatrice; their meeting together in the _Paradiso_; his gazing in
her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been purified by death so
long, separated from him so far:--one likens it to the song of angels;
it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the very
purest, that ever came out of a human soul.

For the _intense_ Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the
essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too
as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity.
Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of
all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;--as indeed,
what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love? '_A Dio
spiacenti ed a' nemici sui_, Hateful to God and to the enemies of
God:' lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; '_Non
ragionam di lor_, We will not speak of _them_, look only and pass.' Or
think of this; 'They have not the _hope_ to die, _Non han speranza di
morte_.' One day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of
Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full
surely _die_; 'that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die.'
Such words are in this man. For rigour, earnestness and depth, he is
not to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we must
go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets there.

I do not agree with much modern criticism, in g