Ed egli a me: Come 'l mio corpo stea Nel mondo sù, nulla scienzia porto. Cotal vantaggio ha questa Tolommea, Che spesse volte l'anima ci cade Innanzi, ch'Atropòs mossa le dea. E perchè tu più volontier mi rade Le 'nvetriate lagrime dal volto, Sappi, che tosto che l'anima trade, Come fec'io, il corpo suo l'è tolto Da un Dimonio, che poscia il governa, Mentre che 'l tempo suo tutto sia volto. Ella ruina in sì fatta cisterna; E forse pare ancor lo corpo suso Dell'ombra, che di qua dietro mi verna. Tu 'l dei saper, se tu vien pur mo giuso: Egli è ser Branca d'Oria, e son più anni Poscia passati, ch'ei fu sì racchiuso. Io credo, diss'io lui, che tu m'inganni, Che Branca d'Oria non morì unquanche, E mangia, e bee, e dorme, e veste panni. Nel fosso sù, diss'ei, di Malebranche, Là dove bolle la tenace pece, Non era giunto ancora Michel Zanche; Che questi lasciò 'l diavolo in sua vece Nel corpo suo, e d'un suo prossimano, Che 'l tradimento insieme con lui fece.--_Inf._ 33.] These are strange experiments in poetry; their strangeness is exaggerated as detached passages; but they are strange enough when they meet us in their place in the context, as parts of a scene, where the mind is strung and overawed by the sustained power, with which dreariness, horror, hideous absence of every form of good, is kept before the imagination and feelings, in the fearful picture of human sin. But they belong to the poet's system of direct and forcible representation. What his inward eye sees, what he feels, that he means us to see and feel as he does; to make us see and feel is his art. Afterwards we may reflect and meditate; but first we must see--must see what he saw. Evil and deformity are in the world, as well as good and beauty; the eye cannot escape them, they are about our path, in our heart and memory. He has faced them without shrinking or dissembling, and extorted from them a voice of warning. In all poetry that is written for mere delight, in all poetry which regards but a part or an aspect of nature, they have no place--they disturb and mar; but he had conceived a poetry of the whole, which would be weak or false without them. Yet they stand in his poem as they stand in nature--subordinate and relieved. If the grotesque is allowed to intrude itself--if the horrible and the foul, undisguised and unsoftened, make us shudder and shrink, they are kept in strong check and in due subjection by other poetical influences; and the same power which exhibits them in their naked strength, renders its full grace and glory to beauty; its full force and delicacy to the most evanescent feeling.