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
motionless and silent clouds. The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre
on his head; the fox peeps out of the ruined tower; the thistle waves
its beard to the wandering gale; and the strings of his harp seem, as
the hand of age, as the tale of other times, passes over them, to sigh
and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! The feeling of
cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of
the annihilation of the substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all
t