is the poets who make revelations, like prophets and sages of old; it is they who invest history with interest, like Shakspeare and Racine, and preserve what is most vital and valuable in it.  They even adorn philosophy, like Lucretius, when he speculated on the systems of the Ionian philosophers.  They certainly impress powerfully on the mind the truths of theology, as Watts and Cowper and Wesley did in their noble lyrics.  So that the most rapt and imaginative of men, if artists, utilize the whole realm of knowledge, and diffuse it, and perpetuate it in artistic forms.  But real poets are rare, even if there are many who glory in the jingle of language and the structure of rhyme.  Poetry, to live, must have a soul, and it must combine rare things,—­art, music, genius, original thought, wisdom made still richer by learning, and, above all, a power of appealing to inner sentiments, which all feel, yet are reluctant to express.  So choice are the gifts, so grand are the qualities, so varied the attainments of truly great poets, that very few are born in a whole generation and in nations that number twenty or forty millions of people.  They are the rarest of gifted men.  Every nation can boast of its illustrious lawyers, statesmen, physicians, and orators; but they can point only to a few of their poets with pride.  We can count on the fingers of one of our hands all those worthy of poetic fame who now live in this great country of intellectual and civilized men,—­one for every ten millions.  How great the pre-eminence even of ordinary poets!  How very great the pre-eminence of those few whom all ages and nations admire!

The critics assign to Dante a pre-eminence over most of those we call immortal.  Only two or three other poets in the whole realm of literature, ancient or modern, dispute his throne.  We compare him with Homer and Shakspeare, and perhaps Goethe, alone.  Civilization glories in Virgil, Milton, Tasso, Racine, Pope, and Byron,—­all immortal artists; but it points to only four men concerning whose transcendent creative power there is unanimity of judgment,—­prodigies of genius, to whose influence and fame we can assign no limits; stars of such surpassing brilliancy that we can only gaze and wonder,—­growing brighter and brighter, too, with the progress of ages; so remarkable that no barbarism will ever obscure their brightness, so original that all imitation of them becomes impossible and absurd.  So great is original genius, directed by art and consecrated to lofty sentiments.

I have assumed the difficult task of presenting one of these great lights.  But I do not presume to analyze his great poem, or to point out critically its excellencies.  This would be beyond my powers, even if I were an Italian.  It takes a poet to reveal a poet.  Nor is criticism interesting to ordinary minds, even in the hands of masters.  I should make critics laugh if I were to attempt to dissect the Divine Comedy.  Although, in an English