arm rescued from wildness and sterility.

Now Dante's monument is "the marvellous, mystic, unfathomable song," in
which he sang his sorrows and his joys, revealed his visions, and
recorded the passions and sentiments of his age. It never can be
popular, because it is so difficult to be understood, and because its
leading ideas are not in harmony with those which are now received. I
doubt if anybody can delight in that poem, unless he sympathizes with
the ideas of the Middle Ages; or, at least, unless he is familiar with
them, and with the historical characters who lived in those turbulent
and gloomy times. There is more talk and pretension about that book than
any one that I know of. Like the "Faerie Queene" or the "Paradise Lost,"
it is a study rather than a recreation; one of those productions which
an educated person ought to read in the course of his life, and which if
he can read in the original, and has read, is apt to boast of,--like
climbing a lofty mountain, enjoyable to some with youth and vigor and
enthusiasm and love of nature, but a very toilsome thing to most people,
especially if old and short-winded and gouty.

In the year 1309 the first part of the "Divine Comedy," the _Inferno_,
was finished by Dante, at the age of forty-four, in the tenth year of
his pilgrimage, under the roof of the Marquis of Lunigiana; and it was
intrusted to the care of Fra Ilario, a monk living on the beautiful
Ligurian shores. As everybody knows, it is a vivid, graphic picture of
what was supposed to be the infernal regions, where great sinners are
punished with various torments forever and ever. It is interesting for
the excellence of the poetry, the brilliant analyses of characters, the
allusion to historical events, the bitter invectives, the intense
sarcasms, and the serious, earnest spirit which underlies the
descriptions. But there is very little of gentleness or compassion, in
view of the protracted torments of the sufferers. We stand aghast in
view of the miseries and monsters, furies and gorgons, snakes and fires,
demons, filth, lakes of pitch, pools of blood, plains of scorching
sands, circles, and chimeras dire,--a physical hell of utter and
unspeakable dreariness and despair, awfully and powerfully described,
but still repulsive. In each of the dismal abodes, far down in the
bowels of the earth, which Dante is supposed to have visited with Virgil
as a guide, in which some infernal deity presides, all sorts of physica