modern poetry, and he may therefore claim a
place in this connection. His poem is the first great step from Gothic
darkness and barbarism; and the struggle of thought in it to burst the
thraldom in which the human mind had been so long held, is felt in every
page. He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which
separates the ancient and the modern world; and saw the glories of
antiquity dawning through the abyss of time, while revelation opened its
passage to the other world. He was lost in wonder at what had been done
before him, and he dared to emulate it. Dante seems to have been
indebted to the Bible for the gloomy tone of his mind, as well as for
the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry; but he is
utterly unlike Homer. His genius is not a sparkling flame, but the
sullen heat of a furnace. He is power, passion, self-will personified.
In all that relates to the descriptive or fanciful part of poetry, he
bears no comparison to many who had gone before, or who have come after
him; but there is a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lies
like a dead weight upon the mind; a benumbing stupor, a breathless awe,
from the intensity of the impression; a terrible obscurity, like that
which oppresses us in dreams; an identity of interest, which moulds
every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the
passions and imaginations of the human soul,--that make amends for all
other deficiencies. The immediate objects he presents to the mind are
not much in themselves, they want grandeur, beauty, and order; but they
become every thing by the force of the character he impresses upon them.
His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates,
instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantage even of the
nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples the
shades of death, and broods over the silent air. He is the severest of
all writers, the most 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