Dante’s painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is everyway noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what qualities in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of eternal black. A small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into our very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: _della bella persona, che mi fu tolta_; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a solace that _he_ will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these _alti guai_. And the racking winds, in that _aer bruno_, whirl them away again, to wail for ever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friend of this poor Francesca’s father; Francesca herself may have sat upon the Poet’s knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigour of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his _Divine Comedy’s_ being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into Hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity, tender as a mother’s, was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante’s. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic,--sentimentality, or little better. I know not in the world an affection equal to that of Dante. It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love: like the wail of Aeolean harps, soft, soft; like a child’s young heart;--and then that stern, sore-saddened heart! These longings of his towards his Beatrice; their meeting together in the _Paradiso_; his gazing in her pure transfigured eyes, her that had been purified by death so long, separated from him so far:--one likens it to the gong of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul.