"No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave; Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind, Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread; Never sees horrid night, the child of hell; But, like a lackey, from the rise to set, Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn, Doth rise _and help Hyperion to his horse_" What a sudden filling of the earth with light through that image, so fresh and unexpected, of the rising sun, with its suggestion of beauty and healthfulness! Then the far-reaching, transfiguring imagination, that, in a twinkle, transmutes into the squire of Hyperion a stolid rustic, making him suddenly radiant with the glory of morning. It is by this union of unexpectedness with fitness, of solidity with brilliancy, of remoteness with instantaneous presence, in his figures, denoting overflow of resources, a divine plenitude, so that we feel after Shakespeare has said his best things, that he could go on saying more and better,--it is especially by this lustrous, ever-teeming fullness of life, this creative readiness, that Shakespeare throws a farther and whiter and a broader light than Dante. Nor does Dante's page glisten, as Shakespeare's so often does, with metaphor, or compressed similes, that at times with a word open the spiritual sphere; not super-imposed as cold ornament, but inter-tissued with the web of thought, upflashings from a deep sea of mind, to quiver on the surface, as on the calm level of the Atlantic you may see a circuit of shining ripple, caused by schools of fish that have come up from the wealth in the depths below to help the sun to glisten,--a sign of life, power, and abundance. Like his great compeer, Milton, Dante fails of universality from want of humor. Neither had any fun in him. This was the only fault (liberally to interpret Can's conduct) that Dante's host, Can Grande of Verona, had to find with him. The subjects of both poets (unconsciously chosen perhaps from this very defect of humor) were predominantly religious, and their theology, which was that of their times, was crude and cruel. The deep, sympathetic earnestness, which is the basis of the best humor, they had, but, to use an illustration of Richter, they could not turn sublimity upside down,--a great feat, only possible through sense of the comic, which, in its highest manifestation of humor, pillows pain in the lap of absurdity, throws such rays upon affliction as to make a grin to glimmer through gloom, and, with the fool in "Lear," forces you, like a child, to smile through warmest tears of sympathy. Humor imparts breadth and buoyancy to tolerance, enabling it to dandle lovingly the faults and follies of men; through humor the spiritual is calm and clear enough to sport with and toss the sensual; it is a compassionate, tearful delight; in its finest mood, an angelic laughter.