"Here vigor failed the towering fantasy: But yet the will rolled onward, like a wheel In even motion, by the love impell'd, That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars." Such is the Divine Comedy of Dante, which has won the undying admiration of all great minds from the poet's own time down to the present. It would lead us too far to go into a detailed analysis of its greatness here, but with one consent men like Carlyle, Ruskin, Gladstone, Browning, and Tennyson in England; Tholuck, Witte, and Kraus, in Germany; Longfellow and Lowell in America, attribute the title of supreme genius to this poem. The Divine Comedy is universal in its compass, containing the elements of dramatic, epic, and lyric poetry; full of sublime imaginations, touching and pathetic episodes, and not deficient even in humor, grotesque at times, but often of a strangely sweet and tender nature. The language is astonishingly simple and concise, and invariably represents the thought of the poet with absolute truth and fidelity. We find in this wonderfully condensed poem no mere epithets, no mere arabesques of style such as adorn the lesser thoughts of lesser men. Each word is in its right place. "It is amazing," says Ruskin, "how every word, almost every syllable, reveals new meanings the more we study them." The metaphors of Dante are especially famous, for the most part simple and drawn from everyday life, yet unexcelled in beauty and especially in their perfect and complete adaptation to the point they are meant to illustrate. Such are those of the old tailor threading his needle, the sheep leaving the fold in huddling groups, the fish disappearing from view in the depths of clear water, and the pearl faintly discernible on a white forehead. Above all, the personality of the author lends a dramatic interest to the poem and exercises a fascination on the reader. As Lowell says, "The man behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself."[18] In the midst of the wonderful landscapes of his own creation, dark and terrible, soft and beautiful, he walks among the men and woman of all ages; he talks to them and hears their stories of half-forgotten crimes and tragedies; he brands them with infamy or sets upon their brows the wreath of praise. It is his love for Beatrice--now become the symbol of spiritual life--which leads him through the realms of sin over the steep rocks of Purgatory to the glory ineffable of God.