I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his _Divine Comedy_ that it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. In the very sound of it there is a _canto fermo_; it proceeds as by a chant. The language, his simple _terza rima_, doubtless helped him in this. One reads along naturally with a sort of _lilt_. But I add, that it could not be otherwise; for the essence and material of the work are themselves rhythmic. Its depth, and rapt passion and sincerity, makes it musical;--go _deep_ enough, there is music everywhere. A true inward symmetry, what one calls an architectural harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the character of music. The three kingdoms, _Inferno_, _Purgatorio_, _Paradiso_, look out on one another like compartments of a great edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the _sincerest_ of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the measure of worth. It came deep out of the author's heart of hearts; and it goes deep, and through long generations, into ours. The people of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, used to say, "_Eccovi l' uom ch' e stato all' Inferno_, See, there is the man that was in Hell!" Ah yes, he had been in Hell;--in Hell enough, in long severe sorrow and struggle; as the like of him is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come out _divine_ are not accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind;--true _effort_, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought. In all ways we are "to become perfect through _suffering_."--_But_, as I say, no work known to me is so elaborated as this of Dante's. It has all been as if molten, in the hottest furnace of his soul. It had made him "lean" for many years. Not the general whole only; every compartment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality. Each answers to the other; each fits in its place, like a marble stone accurately hewn and polished. It is the soul of Dante, and in this the soul of the middle ages, rendered forever rhythmically visible there. No light task; a right intense one: but a task which is _done_.