For the _intense_ Dante is intense in all things; he has got into the essence of all. His intellectual insight as painter, on occasion too as reasoner, is but the result of all other sorts of intensity. Morally great, above all, we must call him; it is the beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love;--as indeed, what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love? ‘_A Dio spiacenti, ed a’ nemici sui_, Hateful to God and to the enemies of God:’ lofty scorn, unappeasable silent reprobation and aversion; ‘_Non ragionam di lor_, We will not speak of _them_, look only and pass.’ Or think of this: ‘They have not the _hope_ to die, _Non han speranza di morte_.’ One day, it had risen sternly benign on the scathed heart of Dante, that he, wretched, never-resting, worn as he was, would full surely _die_; ‘that Destiny itself could not doom him not to die.’ Such words are in this man. For rigour, earnestness and depth, he is not to be paralleled in the modern world; to seek his parallel we must go into the Hebrew Bible, and live with the antique Prophets there. I do not agree with much modern criticism, in greatly preferring the _Inferno_ to the two other parts of the Divine _Commedia_. Such preference belongs, I imagine, to our general Byronism of taste, and is like to be a transient feeling. The _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_, especially the former, one would almost say, is even more excellent than it. It is a noble thing that _Purgatorio_, ‘Mountain of Purification’; an emblem of the noblest conception of that age. If Sin is so fatal, and Hell is and must be so rigorous, awful, yet in Repentance too is man purified; Repentance is the grand Christian act. It is beautiful how Dante works it out. The _tremolar dell’ onde_, that ‘trembling’ of the ocean-waves, under the first pure gleam of morning, dawning afar on the wandering Two, is as the type of an altered mood. Hope has now dawned; never-dying Hope, if in company still with heavy sorrow. The obscure sojourn of daemons and reprobate is under foot; a soft breathing of penitence mounts higher and higher, to the Throne of Mercy itself. ‘Pray for me,’ the denizens of that Mount of Pain all say to him. ‘Tell my Giovanna to pray for me,’ my daughter Giovanna; ‘I think her mother loves me no more!’ They toil painfully up by that winding steep, ‘bent-down like corbels of a building,’ some of them,--crushed together so ‘for the sin of pride’; yet nevertheless in years, in ages and aeons, they shall have reached the top, which is Heaven’s gate, and by Mercy shall have been admitted in. The joy too of all, when one has prevailed; the whole Mountain shakes with joy, and a psalm of praise rises, when one soul has perfected repentance, and got its sin and misery left behind! I call all this a noble embodiment of a true noble thought.