's mind by which he has added
permanently one more great feature to the world, and created a new power
which is to act on mankind to the end. The mystery of the inventive and
creative faculty, the subtle and incalculable combinations by which it
was led to its work, and carried through it, are out of reach of
investigating thought. Often the idea recurs of the precariousness of
the result; by how little the world might have lost one of its
ornaments--by one sharp pang, or one chance meeting, or any other among
the countless accidents among which man runs his course. And then the
solemn recollection supervenes that powers were formed, and life
preserved, and circumstances arranged, and actions controlled, and thus
it should be; and the work which man has brooded over, and at last
created, is the foster-child too of that "Wisdom which reaches from end
to end, strongly and sweetly disposing of all things."

It does not abate these feelings that we can follow in some cases and to
a certain extent the progress of a work. Indeed, the sight of the
particular accidents among which it was developed--which belong perhaps
to a heterogeneous and wildly discordant order of things, which are out
of proportion and out of harmony with it, which do not explain it; which
have, as it seems to us, no natural right to be connected with it, to
bear on its character, or contribute to its accomplishment; to which we
feel, as it were, ashamed to owe what we can least spare, yet on which
its forming mind and purpose were dependent, and with which they had to
conspire--affects the imagination even more than cases where we see
nothing. We are tempted less to musing and wonder by the _Iliad_, a work
without a history, cut off from its past, the sole relic and vestige of
its age, unexplained in its origin and perfection, than by the _Divina
Commedia_, destined for the highest ends and most universal sympathy,
yet the reflection of a personal history, and issuing seemingly from its
chance incidents.

The _Divina Commedia_ is singular among the great works with which it
ranks, for its strong stamp of personal character and history. In
general we associate little more than the name--not the life--of a great
poet with his works; personal interest belongs more usually to greatness
in its active than its creative forms. But the whole idea and purpose of
the _Commedia_, as well as its filling up and coloring, are determined
by Dante's peculiar history. Th