But the idea of the _De Monarchia_ is no key to the _Commedia_. The direct and primary purpose of the _Commedia_ is surely its obvious one. It is to stamp a deep impression on the mind, of the issues of good and ill doing here--of the real worlds of pain and joy. To do this forcibly, it is done in detail--of course it can only be done in figure. Punishment, purification, or the fulness of consolation are, as he would think, at this very moment, the lot of all the numberless spirits who have ever lived here--spirits still living and sentient as himself: parallel with our life, they too are suffering or are at rest. Without pause or interval, in all its parts simultaneously, this awful scene is going on--the judgments of God are being fulfilled--could we but see it. It exists, it might be seen, at each instant of time, by a soul whose eyes were opened, which was carried through it. And this he imagines. It had been imagined before; it is the working out, which is peculiar to him. It is not a barren vision. His subject is, besides the eternal world, the soul which contemplates it; by sight, according to his figures--in reality, by faith. As he is led on from woe to deeper woe, then through the tempered chastisements and resignation of Purgatory to the beatific vision, he is tracing the course of the soul on earth, realising sin and weaning itself from it--of its purification and preparation for its high lot, by converse with the good and wise, by the remedies of grace, by efforts of will and love, perhaps by the dominant guidance of some single pure and holy influence, whether of person, or institution, or thought. Nor will we say but that beyond this earthly probation, he is not also striving to grasp and imagine to himself something of that awful process and training, by which, whether in or out of the flesh, the spirit is made fit to meet its Maker, its Judge, and its Chief Good. Thus it seems that even in its main design, the poem has more than one aspect; it is a picture, a figure, partially a history, perhaps an anticipation. And this is confirmed, by what the poet has himself distinctly stated, of his ideas of poetic composition. His view is expressed generally in his philosophical treatise, the _Convito_; but it is applied directly to the _Commedia_, in a letter, which, if in its present form, of doubtful authenticity, without any question represents his sentiments, and the substance of which is incorporated in one of the earliest writings on the poem, Boccaccio's commentary. The following is his account of the subject of the poem: