hard and impenetrable, the most opposite
to the flowery and glittering; who relies most on his own power, and the
sense of it in others, and who leaves most room to the imagination of his
readers. Dante's only endeavour is to interest; and he interests by
exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed.
He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been
created; but he seizes on the attention, by shewing us the effect they
produce on his feelings; and his poetry accordingly gives the same
thrilling and overwhelming sensation, which is caught by gazing on the
face of a person who has seen some object of horror. The improbability of
the events, the abruptness and monotony in the Inferno, are excessive: but
the interest never flags, from the continued earnestness of the author's
mind. Dante's great power is in combining internal feelings with external
objects. Thus the gate of hell, on which that withering inscription is
written, seems to be endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter
its dread warning, not without a sense of mortal woes. This author
habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the greatest
wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the obscure and shadowy regions of
the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up with the inscription, "I am the
tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth": and half the personages whom he has
crowded into the Inferno are his own acquaintance. All this, perhaps,
tends to heighten the effect by the bold intermixture of realities, and by
an appeal, as it were, to the individual knowledge and experience of the
reader. He affords few subjects for picture. There is, indeed, one
gigantic one, that of Count Ugolino, of which Michael Angelo made a
bas-relief, and which Sir Joshua Reynolds ought not to have painted.

Another writer whom I shall mention last, and whom I cannot persuade
myself to think a mere modern in the groundwork, is Ossian. He is a
feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his
readers. As Homer is the first vigour and lustihed, Ossian is the decay
and old age of poetry. He lives only in the recollection and regret of the
past. There is one impression which he conveys more entirely than all
other poets, namely, the sense of privation, the loss of all things, of
friends, of good name, of country--he is even without God in the world. He
converses only with the spirits of the departed; with the motionl