"To say nothing of its greatness and goodness, the poem of Dante," says Mariotti, "is the most curious of books. The register of the past, noting down every incident within the compass of man's nature.... Dante is the annalist, the interpreter, the representative of the Middle Ages.... The ideas of mankind were in those '_dark_' ages perpetually revolving upon that 'life beyond life,' which the omnipresent religion of that _fanatical_ age loved to people with appalling phantoms and harrowing terrors. Dante determined to anticipate his final doom, and still, in the flesh, to break through the threshold of eternity, and explore the kingdom of death.... No poet ever struck upon a subject to which every fibre in the heart of his contemporaries more readily responded than Dante. It is not for me to test the soundness of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, or to inquire which of the Holy Fathers first dreamt of its existence. It was, however, a sublime contrivance, unscriptural though it may be--a conception full of love and charity, in so far as it seemed to arrest the dead on the threshold of eternity; and making his final welfare partly dependent on the pious exertions of those who were left behind, established a lasting interchange of tender feelings, embalmed the memory of the departed, and by a posthumous tie wedded him to the mourning survivor.... Woe to the man, in Dante's age, who sunk into his grave without bequeathing a heritage of love; on whose sod no refreshing dew of sorrowing affection descended. Lonely as his relics in the sepulchre, his spirit wandered in the dreaded region of probation; alone he was left defenceless, prayerless, friendless to settle his awful score with unmitigated justice. It is this feeling, unrivalled for poetic beauty, that gives color and tone to the second division of Dante's poem. The five or six cantos, at the opening, have all the milk of human nature that entered into the composition of that miscalled saturnine mind. With little more than two words, the poet makes us aware that we have come into happier latitudes. Every strange visitor breathes love and forgiveness. The shade we meet is only charged with tidings of joy to the living, and messages of good will. The heart lightens and brightens at every new stratum of the atmosphere in that rising region; the ascent is easy and light, like the gliding of a boat down the stream. The angels we become familiar with are angels of light, such as human imagination never before nor afterwards conceived. They come from afar across the waves, piloting the barge that conveys the chosen spirits to heaven, balancing themselves on their wide-spread wings, using them as sails, disdaining the aid of all mortal contrivance, and relying on their inexhaustible strength; red and rayless at first, from the distance, as the planet Mars when he appears struggling through the mist of the horizon, but growing brighter and brighter with amazing swiftness.