reatly preferring the
_Inferno_ to the two other parts of the Divine _Commedia_. Such
preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and
is like to be a transient feeling. The _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_,
especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent
than it. It is a noble thing that _Purgatorio_, 'Mountain of
Purification'; an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If Sin
is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in
Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act.
It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The _tremolar dell' onde_ that
'trembling' of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of morning,
dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood.
Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company still with heavy
sorrow. The obscure sojourn of daemons and reprobate is underfoot; a
soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of
Mercy itself. "Pray for me," the denizens of that Mount of Pain all
say to him. "Tell my Giovanna to pray for me," my daughter Giovanna;
"I think her mother loves me no more!" They toil painfully up by that
winding steep, 'bent-down like corbels of a building,' some of
them,--crushed-together so 'for the sin of pride'; yet nevertheless in
years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached the top, which is
Heaven's gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too
of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy,
and a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected repentance
and got its sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble
embodiment of a true noble thought.

But indeed the Three compartments mutually support one another, are
indispensable to one another. The _Paradiso_, a kind of inarticulate
music to me, is the redeeming side of the _Inferno_; the _Inferno_
without it were untrue. All three make-up the true Unseen World, as
figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing forever
memorable, forever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was
perhaps delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in
this of Dante's; a man _sent_ to sing it, to keep it long memorable.
Very notable with what brief simplicity he passes out of the every-day
reality, into the Invisible one; and in the second or third stanza, we
find ourselves in the World of Spirits; and dwell there, as among
things palpable, in