ome
power of creative projection: without wings, this domain cannot be
entered. In Dante's time these attempts were common. Through his
preeminent qualifications, crowned with the poetic faculty, the
faculty of sympathy with ideal excellence, his attempt was a great, a
unique success.

To accompany Dante through his vast triple trans-terrestrial world,
would seem to demand in the reader a sustained effort of imagination.
But Dante is so graphic, and, we might add, corporeal in his pictures,
puts such a pulse into his figures, that the artistic illusion
wherewith we set out is exchanged for, or rather overborne by, an
illusion of the reality of what is represented. Yet from the opening
of the first canto he is ever in the super-earthly world, and every
line of the fourteen thousand has the benefit of a super-earthly, that
is, a poetic atmosphere, which lightens it, transfigures it, floats
it. One reads with the poetic prestige of the knowledge that every
scene is trans-terrestrial; and, at the same time, every scene is
presented with a physical realism, a visual and audible vividness,
which captivates and holds the perceptive faculty; so that the reader
finds himself grasped, as it were, in a vice, whose double handle is
mortised on one side in the senses, and on the other in the spiritual
imagination.

Dante had it in him,--this hell, purgatory, and heaven--so full and
warm and large was his nature. Within his own breast he had felt, with
the keen intensity of the poetic temperament, the loves and hates, the
griefs and delights of life. Through his wealth of heart he had a
fellow-feeling for all the joys and sorrows of his brother-men, and,
added to this, an artist's will and want to reproduce them, and _to_
reproduce them a clear, outwelling, intellectual vivacity. He need
scarcely have told us that his poem, though treating of spirits,
relates to the passions and doings of men in the flesh. He chose a
theme that at once seized the attention of his readers, and gave to
himself a boundless scope. His field was all past history, around the
altitudes of which are clustered biographical traits and sketches of
famous sinners and famous saints, of heroes and lofty criminals; and,
along with this, contemporaneous Florentine and Italian history, with
its tumults and vicissitudes, its biographies and personalities, its
wraths and triumphs.

Dante exhibits great fertility in situations and conjunctions; but,
besides that ma