always.

Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are a symbol withal, an emblematic
representation of his Belief about this Universe:--some Critic in a
future age, like some Scandinavian ones the other day, who has ceased
altogether to think as Dante did, may find this, too, all an
"Allegory," perhaps an idle Allegory! It is a sublime embodiment, or
sublimest, of the soul of Christianity. It expresses, as in huge
world-wide architectural emblems, how the Christian Dante felt Good
and Evil to be the two polar elements of this Creation, on which it
all turns; that these two differ not by _preferability_ of one to the
other, but by incompatibility, absolute and infinite; that the one is
excellent and high as light and Heaven, the other hideous, black as
Gehenna and the Pit of Hell! Everlasting Justice, yet with Penitence,
with everlasting Pity,--all Christianism, as Dante and the Middle Ages
had it, is emblemed here. Emblemed: and yet, as I urged the other day,
with what entire truth of purpose; how unconscious of any embleming!
Hell, Purgatory, Paradise: these things were not fashioned as emblems:
was there in our Modern European Mind, any thought at all of their
being emblems? Were they not indubitable awful facts, the whole heart
of man taking them for practically true, all Nature everywhere
confirming them? So is it always in these things. Men do not believe
an Allegory. The future Critic, whatever his new thought may be, who
considers this of Dante to have been all got up as an Allegory, will
commit one sore mistake!--Paganism we recognize as a veracious
expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the
Universe; veracious, true once, and still not without worth for us.
But mark here the difference of Paganism and Christianism; one great
difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the
destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in
this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law
of Man. One was for the sensuous nature; a rude helpless utterance of
the _first_ Thought of men,--the chief recognized Virtue, Courage,
Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but
for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one respect only!

* * * * *

And so in this Dante, as we said, had ten silent centuries, in a very
strange way, found a voice. The 'Divina Commedia' is of Dante's
writing; yet in truth