O, painstaking friends! Shut your books, clear your minds from artificial nonsense, and feel that only by spirit can spirit be discerned. Dante, like each other great one, took the stuff that lay around him, and wove it into a garment of light. It is not by ravelling that you will best appreciate its tissue or design. It is not by studying out the petty strifes or external relations of his time, that you can become acquainted with the thought of Dante. To him these things were only soil in which to plant himself--figures by which to dramatize and evolve his ideas. Would you learn him, go listen in the forest of human passions to all the terrible voices he heard with a tormented but never-to-be-deafened ear; go down into the hells, where each excess that mars the harmony of nature is punished by the sinner finding no food except from his own harvest; pass through the purgatories of speculation, of struggling hope, and faith, never quite quenched, but smouldering often and long beneath the ashes. Soar if thou canst, but if thou canst not, clear thine eye to see this great eagle soar into the higher region where forms arrange themselves for stellar dance and spheral melody,--and thought, with costly-accelerated motion, raises itself a spiral which can only end in the heart of the Supreme. He who finds in himself no fitness to study Dante in this way, should regard himself as in the position of a candidate for the ancient mysteries, when rejected as unfit for initiation. He should seek in other ways to purify, expand, and strengthen his being, and, when he feels that he is nobler and stronger, return and try again whether he is "grown up to it," as the Germans say. "The difficulty is in the thoughts;" and this cannot be obviated by the most minute acquaintance with the history of the times. Comparison of one edition with another is of use, as a guard against obstructions through mistake. Still more useful will be the method recommended by Mr. Cary, of comparing the Poet with himself; this belongs to the intellectual method, and is the way in which to study our intellectual friend. The versions of Cary and Lyell will be found of use to the student, if he wants to compare his ideas with those of accomplished fellow-students. The poems in the London book would aid much in a full appreciation of the comedy; they ought to be read in the original, but copies are not easily to be met here, unless in the great libraries. The Vita Nuova is the noblest expression extant of the inward life of Love, the best preface and comment to every thing else that Dante did.