For the movement of the _Divina Commedia_ is at once logical and imaginative, an extraordinary fusion of rhetoric and poetic. The first canto closes with a forecast of the whole progress. Lead me where thou hast said, that I may see the gate of St. Peter. I. i. 134. Throughout, the progress is so reasoned that it can be mapped and briefed. None the less the _Divina Commedia_ is a great exemplar of poetic movement. It arrives not at a demonstration, but at a catharsis. Its conception, at once constant and widening, is carried forward imaginatively. We move not from proposition to proposition, but from scene to scene. The _Faerie Queene_, no less imaginative in detail, has none of this force of imaginative composition. The _Christ_ in the earliest middle age, the _Pearl_ in the latest, have far less scope. The _Divina Commedia_ reveals the whole capacity of medieval symbolism by sustained poetic movement. So sustained a movement has no time for the conventional descriptive pause. In spite of the abundance of its illustrations, the _Divina Commedia_ is never merely pictorial.[23] Nor is the steady movement monotonous. The transitions are beautifully various. _Purgatorio_ does not repeat the plan of _Inferno_; and it has more interaction. As the action advances through _Purgatorio_ into _Paradiso_, there is increasing exposition of ideas. There is even the Gothic variety that enlivens the cathedrals. The grotesque devils of the twenty-second canto of _Inferno_ are brothers to those on the capitals of Vézelay. At the other pole of sentiment, the eleventh canto of _Purgatorio_ opens with a poetic amplification of the Paternoster. The fifth canto of _Paradiso_ is Justinian’s summary of the history of Rome. But the variety is never merely picturesque. Never merely aggregative, the variations of the _Divina Commedia_ are more like those of Bourges than like those of Chartres. They are still more like the variations in a symphony. The logical order fused with this poetic movement is: _Inferno_, the punishment of self-enslavement; _Purgatorio_, the progress of self-mastery; _Paradiso_, the rapture of self-expression. From perversion and frustration we pass through discipline to the liberation of personality. Then said my lady, “Let out the heat of thy desire, so that thy utterance bear the print of the press within; not that our knowledge may increase by thy speaking, but that thou mayst learn how to tell thy thirst, that drink be given thee.” III. xvii. 7. It is through this liberation of personality that the human drama becomes divine. “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” For the _Divina Commedia_ is far more than a vindication of free will; it is a vision of the progressive freeing of the will. After the terrible revelation of hell as self-enslavement, free will is asserted from purgatory as essential to divine justice.