regions of the second death?

After various wanderings in France and Italy, and after an interval of
three years, Dante produced the second part of the poem,--the
_Purgatorio_,--in which he assumes another style, and sings another
song. In this we are introduced to an illustrious company,--many beloved
friends, poets, musicians, philosophers, generals, even prelates and
popes, whose deeds and thoughts were on the whole beneficent. These
illustrious men temporarily expiate the sins of anger, of envy, avarice,
gluttony, pride, ambition,--the great defects which were blended with
virtues, and which are to be purged out of them by suffering. Their
torments are milder, and amid them they discourse on the principles of
moral wisdom. They utter noble sentiments; they discuss great themes;
they show how vain is wealth and power and fame; they preach sermons. In
these discourses, Dante shows his familiarity with history and
philosophy; he unfolds that moral wisdom for which he is most
distinguished. His scorn is now tempered with tenderness. He shows a
true humanity; he is more forgiving, more generous, more sympathetic. He
is more lofty, if he is not more intense. He sees the end of expiations:
the sufferers will be restored to peace and joy.

But even in his purgatory, as in his hell, he paints the ideas of his
age. He makes no new or extraordinary revelations. He arrives at no new
philosophy. He is the Christian poet, after the pattern of his age.

It is plain that the Middle Ages must have accepted or invented some
relief from punishment, or every Christian country would have been
overwhelmed with the blackness of despair. Men could not live, if they
felt they could not expiate their sins. Who could smile or joke or eat
or sleep or have any pleasure, if he thought seriously there would be no
cessation or release from endless pains? Who could discharge his
ordinary duties or perform his daily occupations, if his father or his
mother or his sister or his brother or his wife or his son or his
daughter might not be finally forgiven for the frailties of an imperfect
nature which he had inherited? The Catholic Church, in its
benignity,--at what time I do not know,--opened the future of hope amid
the speculations of despair. She saved the Middle Ages from universal
gloom. If speculation or logic or tradition or scripture pointed to a
hell of reprobation, there must be also a purgatory as the field of
expiation,--for expiation th