The greatness of his work is not in its details--to be made or marred by them. It is the greatness of a comprehensive and vast conception, sustaining without failure the trial of its long and hazardous execution, and fulfilling at its close the hope and promise of its beginning; like the greatness--which we watch in its course with anxious suspense, and look back upon when it is secured by death, with deep admiration--of a perfect life. Many a surprise, many a difficulty, many a disappointment, many a strange reverse and alternation of feelings, attend the progress of the most patient and admiring reader of the _Commedia_; as many as attend on one who follows the unfolding of a strong character in life. We are often shocked when we were prepared to admire--repelled, when we came with sympathy; the accustomed key fails at a critical moment--depths are revealed which we cannot sound, mysteries which baffle and confound us. But the check is for a time--the gap and chasm does not dissever. Haste is even an evidence of life--the brief word, the obscure hint, the unexplained, the unfinished, or even the unachieved, are the marks of human feebleness, but are also among those of human truth. The unity of the whole is unimpaired. The strength which is working it out, though it may have at times disappointed us, shows no hollowness or exhaustion. The surprise of disappointment is balanced--there is the surprise of unimagined excellence. Powers do more than they promised; and that spontaneous and living energy, without which neither man nor poet can be trusted, and which showed its strength even in its failures, shows it more abundantly in the novelties of success--by touching sympathies which have never been touched before, by the unconstrained freshness with which it meets the proverbial and familiar, by the freedom with which it adjusts itself to a new position or an altered task--by the completeness, unstudied and instinctive, with which it holds together dissimilar and uncongenial materials, and forces the most intractable, the most unaccustomed to submission, to receive the colour of the whole--by its orderly and unmistakable onward march, and its progress, as in height, so in what corresponds to height. It was one and the same man, who rose from the despair, the agony, the vivid and vulgar horrors of the _Inferno_, to the sense and imagination of certainty, sinlessness, and joy ineffable--the same man whose power and whose sympathies failed him not, whether discriminating and enumerating, as if he had gone through them all, the various forms of human suffering, from the dull, gnawing sense of the loss of happiness, to the infinite woes of the wrecked and ruined spirit, and the coarser pangs of the material flesh; or dwelling on the changeful lights and shades of earnest repentance, in its hard, but not unaided or ungladdened struggle, and on that restoration to liberty and peace, which can change even this