Thus proved, and thus furnished--thus independent and confident, daring to trust his instinct and genius in what was entirely untried and unusual, he entered on his great poem, to shadow forth, under the figure of his own conversion and purification, not merely how a single soul rises to its perfection, but how this visible world, in all its phases of nature, life, and society, is one with the invisible, which borders on it, actuates, accomplishes, and explains it. It is this vast plan--to take into his scope, not the soul only in its struggles and triumph, but all that the soul finds itself engaged with in its course; the accidents of the hour, and of ages past; the real persons, great and small, apart from and without whom it cannot think or act; the material world, its theatre and home--it is this which gives so many various sides to the _Commedia_, which makes it so novel and strange. It is not a mere personal history, or a pouring forth of feeling, like the _Vita Nuova_, though he is himself the mysterious voyager, and he opens without reserve his actual life and his heart; he speaks, indeed, in the first person, yet he is but a character of the drama, and in great part of it with not more of distinct personality than in that paraphrase of the penitential Psalms, in which he has preluded so much of the _Commedia_. Yet the _Commedia_ is not a pure allegory; it admits, and makes use of the allegorical, but the laws of allegory are too narrow for it; the real in it is too impatient of the veil, and breaks through in all its hardness and detail, into what is most shadowy. History is indeed viewed not in its ephemeral look, but under the light of God's final judgments; in its completion, not in its provisional and fragmentary character; viewed therefore but in faith;--but its issues, which in this confused scene we ordinarily contemplate in the gross, the poet brings down to detail and individuals; he faces and grasps the tremendous thought that the very men and women whom we see and speak to, are now the real representatives of sin and goodness, the true actors in that scene which is so familiar to us as a picture--unflinching and terrible heart, he endures to face it in its most harrowing forms. But he wrote not for sport, nor to give poetic pleasure; he wrote to warn; the seed of the _Commedia_ was sown in tears, and reaped in misery: and the consolations which it offers are awful as they are real.