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