A judgment less terrible than what follows is that by which Dante long ago made fast the gates of hell upon Nicholas and Boniface and Clement with one stroke of his inevitable hand. The ghastly agony of the condemned is given with all the bitterest realism of the great elder anti-papist who sent so many vicars of Christ to everlasting torment for less offenses than those of Mastai-Ferretti. Lui se tourna vers l'ange en frissonnant, Et je vis le spectacle horrible et surprenant D'un homme qui vieillit pendant qu'on le regarde. L'agonie éteignit sa prunelle hagarde, Sa bouche bégaya, son jarret se rompit, Ses cheveux blanchissaient sur son front décrépit, Ses tempes se ridaient comme si les années S'étaient subitement sur sa face acharnées, Ses yeux pleuraient, ses dents claquaient comme au gibet Les genoux d'un squelette, et sa peau se plombait, Et, stupide, il baissait, à chaque instant plus pâle, Sa tête qu'écrasait la tiare papale. From the sentence passed upon him after the avowal extorted by the angel of doom that he has none in the world above him but God alone on whom to cast the responsibility of his works, not a word may be taken away for the purpose of quotation, as not a word could have been added to it by Dante or by Ezekiel himself. But about the eternity of his damnation there is not, happily for the human conscience, any manner of doubt possible; it must endure as long as the poem which proclaims it: in other words, as long as the immortality of poetry itself. This great and terrible poem, the very crown or coping-stone of all the _Châtiments_, has a certain affinity with two others in which the poet's yearning after justice and mercy has borne his passionate imagination as high and far as here. In _Sultan Mourad_ his immeasurable and incomparable depth of pity and charity seems well nigh to have swallowed up all sense of necessary retribution: it is perhaps because the portentous array of crimes enumerated is remote in time and place from all experience of ours that conscience can allow the tenderness and sublimity of its inspiration to justify the moral and ratify the sentence of the poem:-- Viens! tu fus bon un jour, sois à jamais heureux. Entre, transfiguré! tes crimes ténébreux, Ô roi, derrière toi s'effacent dans les gloires; Tourne la tête, et vois blanchir tes ailes noires.