ion, whose parts are all subordinated to a great
unity, the "Divina Commedia," as an organic, artistic whole, is
inferior to the "Iliad" and "Paradise Lost," and to the Grecian and
Shakespearean tragedies.

The exclusive super-earthliness of his scenes and personages, and,
with this, his delight in picture-drawing, keep Dante close to his
page--fastened to it, we might say, by a twofold fascination. Among
the many faculties that equip him for his extraordinary task, most
active is that of form. Goethe says of him, "The great intellectual
and moral qualities of Dante being universally acknowledged, we shall
be furthered in a right estimate of his works, if we keep in view that
just in his life-time--Giotto being his contemporary--was the re-birth
of plastic art in all its natural strength. By this sensuous,
form-loving spirit of the age, working so widely and deeply, Dante,
too, was largely swayed. With the eye of his imagination he seized
objects so distinctly that he could reproduce them in sharp outline.
Thence we see before us the most abstruse and unusual, drawn, as it
were, after nature." In recognition of the same characteristic,
Coleridge says, "In picturesqueness Dante is beyond all other poets,
ancient or modern, and more in the stern style of Pindar than of any
other. Michael Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of
the 'Divina Commedia.'"

Dante, eminent in poetic gifts, has many sides, but this is his
strongest side: he is preeminently a poet of form. In his mind and in
his work there is a southern, an Italian, sensuousness. He is a poet
of thought, but more a poet of molds; he is a poet of sentiment, but
more a poet of pictures. Rising readily to generalization, still his
intellect is more specific than generic. His subject--chosen by the
concurrence of his aesthetic, moral, and intellectual needs--admits
of, nay, demands portraits, isolated sketches, unconnected
delineations. The personages of his poem are independent one of the
other, and are thence the more easily drawn. Nor does Dante abound in
transferable passages, sentences of universal application, from being
saturated with the perfumed essence of humanity. We say it with
diffidence, but to us it seems that there is a further poetic glance,
more idealized fidelity, in Milton; more significance and wisdom and
profound hint in Goethe. In Milton the mental reverberation is wider:
he rivets us through distant grand association, by great