The reader of these lines (however inferior the translation may be), cannot have failed to perceive by what natural action and speech the paternal anxiety of Cavalcante respecting his son is indicated. On his bed of torture he hears a voice which he knows to be that of his son's friend; he starts up, looks eagerly about, as expecting to see that son; but observing the friend only, he at once interrupts the dialogue with Farinata, and in broken exclamations enquires concerning him. Dante happening to employ the past tense of a verb in reference to what his "Guido" might have done, the miserable parent instantly lays hold of that minute circumstance as an intimation of his death, and asks questions of which he dreads the answers, precisely in the manner of Macduff when he learns that his wife and children had been murdered by Macbeth. The poet hesitating to reply. Cavalcante takes the worst for granted, falls back in despair, and appears not again. Thus,

Dante, however, at the close of the scene, unexpectedly recurs to his own fault with the tenderness of compunction and delicacy of respect due to an unfortunate being, whom he had unintentionally agonised with his silence, and sends a message to the old man that his son yet lives.[26] Contrasted with this trembling sensibility of a father's affection, stronger than death, and out-feeling the pains of hell, is the stern, calm, patient dignity of Farinata, who, though wounded to the quick by the retort of Dante at the moment when their discourse was broken upon, stands unmoved in mind, in look, in posture, till the interlude is ended; and then, without the slightest allusion to it, he takes up the suspended argument at the last words of his opponent, as though his thoughts had all the while been ruminating on the disgrace of his friends, the afflictions of his family, and the inextinguishable enmity of his countrymen against himself. His noble rejoinder, on Dante's reference to the carnage at Monte Aperto as the cause of his people's implacability, is above all praise. Indeed, it would be difficult to point out, in ancient or modern tragedy, a passage of more sublimity or pathos, in which so few words express so much, yet leave so much more to be imagined by any one who has "a human heart," as the whole of this scene in the original exhibits.

Dante's poem is certainly neither the greatest nor the best in the world; but it is, perhaps, the most extraordinary one which resolute intellect ever planned, or persevering talents successfully executed. It stands alone; and must be read and judged according to rules and immunities adapted to its peculiar structure, plot, and purpose, formed upon principles affording scope to the exercise of the highest powers, with little regard to precedent. If these principles, then, have intrinsic excellence, and the work be found uniformly consistent with them, fulfilling to the utmost the aims of the author, the "Divina Commedia" must be allowed to stand among the proudest trophies of original genius, challenging, encountering, and overcoming unparalleled difficulties. Though the fields of action, or rather of vision, are nominally Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise,—the Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell of Dante, with all their terrors, and splendours, and preternatural fictions, are but representations of scenes transacted on earth, and characters that lived antecedently or contemporaneously with himself. Though altogether out of the world, the whole is of the world. Men and women seem fixed in eternal torments, passing through purifying flames, or exalted to celestial beatitude; yet in all these situations they are what they were; and It is their former history, more than their present happiness, hope, or despair, which constitutes, through a hundred cantos, the interest, awakened and kept up by the successive exhibition of more than a thousand individual actors and sufferers. Of every one of these something terrible or touching is intimated or told, briefly at the utmost, but frequently by mere hints of narrative or gleams of allusion, which excite curiosity in the breast of the reader; who is surprised at the poet's forbearance, when, in the notes of commentators, he finds complex, strange, and fearful circumstances, on which a modern versifier or novelist would expend pages, treated here as ordinary events, on which it would be impertinent to dwell. These, in the author's own age, were generally understood; the bulk of the materials being gathered up during a period of restlessness and confusion among the republican states of Italy.

Hence, though the first appearance of the "Divina Commedia," in any intelligible edition, is repulsive from the multitude of notes, and the text is not seldom difficult and dark with the oracular compression of strong ideas in few and pregnant words, yet will the toil and patience of any reader he well repaid, who perseveringly proceeds but a little way, quietly referring, as occasion may require, from the obscurity of the original to the illustrations below; for when he returns from the latter to the former (as though his own eye had been refreshed with new light, the darkness having been in it, and not in the verse), what was colourless as a cloud is radiant with beauty, and what before was undefined in form becomes exquisitely precise and symmetrical, from comprehending in so small a compass so vast a variety of thought, feeling, or fact. Dante, in this respect, must be studied as an author in a dead language by a learner, or rather as one who employs a living language on forgotten themes; then will his style grow easier and clearer as the reader grows more and more acquainted with his subject, his manner, and his materials. For whatever be the corruptions of the text (which perhaps has never been sufficiently collated), the remoteness of the allusions, and our countrymen's want of that previous knowledge of almost every thing treated upon, which best prepares the mind for the perception and highest enjoyment of poetical beauty and poetical pleasure, Dante will be found, in reality, one of the most clear, minute, and accurate writers in sentiment, as he is one of the most perfectly natural and graphic painters to the life of persons, characters, and actions. His draughts have the freedom of etchings, and the sharpness of proof impressions. His poem is well worth all the pains which the most indolent reader may take to master it.

Ordinary poetry is often striking and captivating at first view, but all its merit is at once elicited; and frequently that which charmed so much at first becomes less and less affecting, less and less defined, the more it is examined, till light turns to mist, and mist to shadow in the end; whereas the highest order of poetry—that which is intellectual—the longer it is dwelt upon, the lovelier, the nobler, the more delightful it appears, and when fully understood remains imperishable in its graces and effects; repetition a thousand times does not impair it; its creations, like those of nature,—familiar, indeed, as the sun and the stars,—are never less glorious and beautiful, though daily before us. Dante's poetry (extravagant and imaginative as he often may be) is thoroughly intellectual; there is no enthusiasm of feeling, but there is much of philosophical and theological subtlety, and of course much absurdity in some of his reveries; yet his passion is always pure and unaffected, his descriptions are daylight realities, and his heroes men of flesh and blood. Probably no other work of human genius so far exceeds in its development the expectation of prejudiced or unprepared readers, as the "Divina Commedia;" or performs, in fact, so much more than it seems to promise.

Dante has created a hell, purgatory, and paradise of his own; and, being satisfied with the present world as a nursery for his personages, he has peopled his ultramundane regions with these, assigning to all their abodes "sulphureous or ambrosial," or refining those who were yet corrigible after death, according to his own pleasure, his theological views, and his moral feelings. It must be confessed that, whatever were his passions, prejudices, or failings, his attachments or antipathies, as an arbiter of fate he appears honestly to have distributed justice, to the best of his knowledge, to all whom he has cited before his tribunal, leaving in the case of every one (perhaps) a judgment unimpeachable and unappealable; so forcibly does he impress the mind with the truth and reality of the evidence of their merit or turpitude, which he produces to warrant his sentences. As a man, he is, indeed, fierce, splenetic, and indignant at times, especially in execrating his countrymen for their profligacy and injustice towards himself; yet (though there may have been primary motives less noble than the apparent ones, at the bottom of his heart, unsuspected even by himself,) his anger and his vengeance seem always directed against those who deserved to be swept from the face of the earth, as venal, treacherous, parricidal wretches. With the wonders which he beheld in his invisible world, in his complicated travels through its triple round of labyrinths;—as, in hell, wheel within wheel, diminishing downward to the centre; in purgatory, circle above circle, terminating in the garden of Eden; and, in his paradise, orb beyond orb, through the solar system to the heaven of heavens, where he "presumed, an earthly guest, and drew empyreal air;"—with these he has constructed a poem of a thousand pages, exhibiting the greatest diversity of characters, scenes, circumstances, and events, that were ever embraced in an equal compass; while all are made perfectly to harmonise and conduce to one process, carried on at every step of his pilgrimage, namely, the gradual purification of the poet himself, by the examples which he sees and the lessons which he hears; as well as by the toils he undergoes, the pains he endures, and the bliss he partakes, in his long and dreary path down into the nether regions, where there is no hope; up the steep hill, where, though there is suffering, there is no fear of ultimate release; and on his flight through the "nine-enfolded spheres," where all are as happy as they can be in their present station, yet, as they pass from stage to stage, rise in capacity and means of enjoyment to fulness of felicity in the beatific vision.

Dante was the very poet, and the "Divina Commedia" the very poem, to be expected from the influence of all existing circumstances in church and state at the time when he flourished. The poet and his age were homogeneous, and his song was as truly in season as that of the nightingale in spring; the winter of barbarism had broken up, the summer heat of refinement had not yet come on: a century earlier there would have been too much ignorance, a century later too much intelligence, to form such a theme and such a minstrel; for though Dante, in any age, must have been one of its greatest bards, yet the bard that he was he could not have been in any other than that in which he lived.

Dante, as hath already been intimated, is the hero of his own poem; and the "Divina Commedia" is the only example of an attempt triumphantly achieved, and placed beyond the reach of scorn or neglect, wherein, from beginning to end, the author discourses concerning himself individually. Had this been done in any other way than the consummately simple, delicate, and unobtrusive one which he has adopted, the whole would have been insufferable egotism, disgusting coxcombry, or oppressive dulness,—whereas this personal identity is the charm, the strength, the soul of the book: he lives, he breathes, he moves through it; his pulse beats or stands still, his eye kindles or fades, his cheek grows pale with horror, colours with shame, or burns with indignation; we hear his voice, his step, in every page; we see his shape by the flames of hell, his shadow in the land where there is no other shadow ("Purgatorio"), and his countenance gaining angelic elevation from "colloquy sublime" with glorified intelligences in the paradise above. Nor does he ever go out of his actual character;—he is, indeed, the lover from infancy of Beatrice, the aristocratic magistrate of a fierce democracy, the valiant soldier in the field of Campaldino, the fervent patriot in the feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines, the eloquent and subtle disputant in the schools of theology; the melancholy exile, wandering from court to court, depending for bread and shelter on petty princes who knew not his worth, except as a splendid captive in their train; and, above all (though not obtrusively so), he is the poet anticipating his own assured renown, and dispensing at his will honour or infamy to others, whom he need but to name, and the sound must be heard to the end of time, and echoed from all regions of the globe. Dante, in his vision, is Dante as he lived, as he died, and as he expected to live in both worlds beyond death,—an immortal spirit in the one, an unforgotten poet in the other. Pride of birth, consciousness of genius, religious feeling almost to fanaticism, and the sense of wrongs, under which he is alternately inflamed with rage, withered with disappointment, or saddened with despair,—these are continually reminding the reader of the man as he was; stimulating his jaded hope with the bitter sweet of revenge, which he could wreak at will upon his enemies; and solacing a wounded spirit with the thought of fame in possession, which his fellow-citizens could not confiscate, and fame in reversion, of which contemporaries could not cut off the entail.

Yet while he is thus in every point an individual, he is at the same time an exemplar of the whole species; and he may emphatically say to the reader who can follow him in his journeys, receive his inspirations, and share in his troubles, anxieties, joys, and disappointments:—"Am I not a man and a brother?" Dante, though in this sense the hero of his own poem, is any thing but a hero, either in the vulgar or the chivalrous sense of the term. He is a human being, with all the faults, frailties, and imperfections of our common nature, as they really existed in himself, and as they more or less exist in every other person; nor can a less sophisticated character be found in all the volumes of prose and rhyme that have appeared since this auto-biographical poem. He assumes nothing; he conceals nothing; his fears, his ignorance, his loves, and his enmities, are all undisguisedly set forth, as though he were all the while communing with his own heart, without the cowardly apprehension of blame, or the secret desire of applause from a fellow-creature. He is always, indeed, noble, manly, and candid, but travelling continually in company of some superior intelligence,—Virgil in hell and purgatory, and Beatrice in purgatory and heaven,—he always defers to the one or the other in difficulty, doubt, or danger, and clings for protection, as well as looks up for instruction, with childlike simplicity and docility; returning with the most reverent and affectionate gratitude every token of kindness received from either.

Marvellous and incredible, it must be confessed, are many of the stories which he tells; but he tells them with the plainness and straight-forwardness of a man who is speaking the truth, and nothing else, of his own knowledge.

In the last cantos of the "Purgatorio," and throughout the "Paradiso," there is a prodigious putting forth of power to describe ineffable and eternal things; with inexhaustible prodigality of illustration, and transmutation of the same symbols, to constitute different gradations of blessedness and glory. Of these, however, there are scarcely any types except light, colour, sound, and motion, variously combined to represent spiritual beings, their forms, their occupations, and manner of discoursing; but even amongst such inexpressible, nay, unimaginable scenes and passages, the human nature which cleaves to the poet, and shows itself, under every transmigration, allied to flesh and blood, gives an interest which allegorical pictures of invisible realities can never keep up beyond the first brilliant impression. Yet the vitality and strength of the poem reside chiefly in the first and second parts; diminishing just in proportion as the author rises above the regions which exhibit the sins and sufferings of creatures like ourselves, punished with everlasting destruction in hell, or "burnt and purged away," through the penal inflictions of purgatory. It may, however, be said, with regard to the whole, that no ideal beings, ideal scenes, or ideal occurrences, in any poem or romance, have ever more perfectly personified truth and nature than those in this composition, which, though the theatre is figuratively beyond the limits of human action, is nevertheless full of such action in its most common as well as its most extraordinary forms.

There is scarcely a decorous attitude of the human frame, a look expressive of the most concealed sentiment, or a feeling of pain, pleasure, surprise, doubt, fear, agony, hope, delight, which is not described with a minuteness of discrimination alike curious and admirable; the poet himself frequently being the subject of the same, and exciting our sympathy by the lively or poignant remembrance of having ourselves done, looked, felt like him, when we were far from being ingenuous enough to acknowledge the weakness implied. There is scarcely a phenomenon in the visible heavens, the earth, the sea, and the phases of nature, which he has not presented in the most striking manner. In such instances he frequently descends to the nicest particulars, that he may realise the exact view of them which he wishes to be taken; they being necessarily illustrations of invisible and preternatural subjects. This leads to the remark, that the poem abounds with similes of the greatest variety, beauty, and elegance; often, likewise, of the most familiar, touching, or grotesque character. Among these, birds are favourite images, especially the stork and the falcon,—the two last that an English poet of the nineteenth century would think of, but which happily remind us, as often as they are seen here, of the country of the author, while they present pictures of times gone by,—the stork having long ago deserted our shores, and falconry, poetical and captivating as it is to the eye and the fancy, having been abandoned in the fashionable rage for preserves, where game are bred like poultry, and massacred by wholesale on field-days. Next to birds, children are the darlings, in the similes, of this stern, and harsh, and gloomy being, as he is often, though unjustly, represented to have been. Amidst his most dazzling, terrific, or monstrous creations, these little ones, in all their loveliness and hilarity, are introduced, to re-invigorate the tired thoughts, and cool the over-heated imagination with reminiscence of that which, in this world, may be looked upon with the least pain, and which cannot be looked upon with pleasure without our being the better for it; the love of children, and the delight of seeing them happy, being a test of every other species of kindness towards our fellow-creatures.

It is unnecessary to pursue general criticism further. Any analysis of the plot would be preposterous here; for nothing less than a progressive abstract of the whole, with examples from every stage, would be satisfactory, or indeed intelligible, to those who are not acquainted with the original, or the translation into English by the Reverend H. F. Cary, which may be said to fail in nothing except the versification—and that, perhaps, only in consequence of the writer's attention to what constitutes the chief merit of his performance, fidelity to the meaning of the text.

It was the purpose of the writer of the foregoing memoir to have concluded his strictures on the "Divina Commedia" with a series of newly-translated specimens from the same (like the foregoing ones), in the various kinds of style for which the author was distinguished, in order to give the English reader some faint idea of this poet's very peculiar manner of handling his subject, and the general cast of his mind and mode of thinking: but the limits of the present work precluding any further extension of this article, these are reserved, and may be laid before the public at some future opportunity.