This Dante has done. He had before him, as material, the history of the present as well as of the Past. He could not elaborate this into a pure Epos, partly on account of its nature, partly because, in doing this, he would have excluded other elements of the culture of his time. To its completeness belonged also the Astronomy, the Theology and Philosophy of the time. To these he could not give expression in a Didactic poem, for by so doing he would again have limited himself. Consequently, in order to make his Poem universal, he was obliged to make it historical. An invention, entirely uncontrolled, and proceeding from his own individuality, was necessary, to unite these materials and form them into an organic whole. To represent the ideas of Philosophy and Theology in symbols was impossible, for there then existed no symbolic Mythology. He could quite as little make his Poem purely allegorical, for then again it could not be historical. It was necessary therefore to make it an entirely unique mixture of Allegory and History. In the emblematic poetry of the ancients no clue of this kind was possible. The Individual only could lay hold of it, and only an uncontrolled invention follow it. The poem of Dante is not allegorical in the sense that its figures only signified something else, without having any separate existence independent of the thing signified. On the other hand, none of them is independent of the thing signified in such a way as to be at once the Idea itself and more than an allegory of it. There is therefore in his Poem an entirely unique mean between Allegory and symbolic-objective Form. There is no doubt, and the Poet has himself elsewhere declared it, that Beatrice, for example, is an Allegory, namely, of Theology. So her companions; so many other characters. But at the same time they count for themselves, and appear on the scene as historic personages, without on that account being symbols. In this respect Dante is archetypal, since he has proclaimed what the modern poet has to do, in order to embody into a poetic whole, the entire history and culture of his age—the only mythological material which lies before him. He must from absolute arbitrariness join together the allegorical and historical: he must be allegorical, (and he is so, too, against his will,) because he cannot be symbolical; and he must be historical because he wishes to be poetical. In this respect his invention is always peculiar, a world by itself, and altogether characteristic. The only German poem of universal plan, unites together in a similar manner the outermost extremes in the aspirations of the times, by a very peculiar invention of a subordinate mythology, in the character of Faust: although in the Aristophanic meaning of the word it may far better be called a Comedy, and is another and more poetic sense Divine, than the Poem of Dante.