On the face of it, it is a narrative of a journey taken by the poet through Hell, through Purgatory, and into Paradise. In Easter week of the year 1300, Dante is led by Virgil (who to the Middle Ages had strangely enough become the incarnation of this world’s wisdom) down through the concentric circles of Hell—a funnel-shaped abyss within the centre of the earth—and descends step after step to greater and greater horrors. There he sees the gluttons wallowing in fetid mud, and the leaders of heresies burning in half-opened tombs; he sees the sinners of avarice and of prodigality suffer together with mutual revilings; he sees the steady rain of burning flakes of fire; he is amazingly fertile in other agonies for unrepentant or unshriven sinners. Then, from the _Inferno_, under the self-same guidance, he mounts to the light and ascends the mountain of Purgatorio, which rises like a cone, plane after plane, in seven tiers for the seven deadly sins. Here the souls that are being purified are suffering penances, which grow less and less awful as we approach the summit. On the summit itself is the Terrestrial Paradise. Further than that Virgil, the pagan poet, may not go; but Beatrice, Dante’s lost love and his emblem of Christian faith, comes down to meet him, and together they rise in spiral rings of flight, upward and upward through glory after glory, till they reach the true Paradise, and stand in the presence of the Beatific Vision. There is something awe-inspiring in the very contemplation of a subject so vast: yet Dante combines and handles all these mysteries with such a vivid realistic power that the last suggestion to rise in the reader’s mind is any suspicion of grotesque, still less of futile, extravagance. His pictures are intensely vivid. His creations live. It would be no wonder if the good people of Verona really pointed him out in awe, and said, “Yonder is the man who has been in Hell!” A pictorial artist could scarcely exhaust Dante in subjects for paintings. And, with it all, his mere language is as simple and direct as was ever used by a poet’s pen. It is so far Homeric. Almost the mere noun and verb suffice to say what he has to say, and yet, somehow, that same noun and verb combine into a sweet and majestic harmony which fit the sublime subject as the “organ-voice” of Milton fitted his. We must, of course, make all concession to the ignorance of his day and the unattractive subtleties of the philosophy. These may often affect our interest, but they take nothing from the poet’s genius.