It appears, then, that when Dante adopted, as the subject of his immortal poem, the secrets of the invisible world, and the three kingdoms of the dead, he could not possibly have selected a more popular theme. It had the advantage of combining the most profound feelings of religion with those vivid recollections of patriotic glory and party contentions which were necessarily suggested by the reappearance of the illustrious dead on this novel theatre. At the close of the century, in the year 1300, and in the week of Easter, Dante supposes himself to be wandering in the deserts near Jerusalem, and to be favoured with the means of access to the realm of shadows. He is there met by Virgil, the object of his incessant study and admiration, who takes upon himself the office of guide, and who, by his own admirable description of the heathen hell, seems to have acquired a kind of right to reveal the mysteries of these forbidden regions. The two bards arrive at a gate, on which are inscribed these terrific words:[e] “Through me you pass into the city of woe: Through me you pass into eternal pain: Through me, among the people lost for aye. Justice the founder of my fabric mov’d: To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom, and primeval love. Before me things create were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I endure. All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”[o] The theme of the poem is too familiar to need further exposition here. It may be interesting to note, however, that the sequence of regions through which the poet journeys in witnessing the rewards of paradise is suggested by the ideas of cosmology that were prevalent in Dante’s time. The poem thus has interest from a scientific as well as from an artistic standpoint--an interest that is enhanced by the reflection that the time was almost at hand when a new system of cosmology would supplant the Ptolemaic one here suggested, and in so doing usher in a new scientific era, somewhat as the poem itself ushered in a new era of literature.[a]