Poetry which relates to the beings of another world ought to be at once mysterious and picturesque.  That of Milton is so.  That of Dante is picturesque, indeed, beyond any that ever was written.  Its effect approaches to that produced by the pencil or the chisel.  But it is picturesque to the exclusion of all mystery.  This is a fault on the right side, a fault inseparable from the plan of Dante’s poem, which, as we have already observed, rendered the utmost accuracy of description necessary.  Still it is a fault.  The supernatural agents excite an interest; but it is not the interest which is proper to supernatural agents.  We feel that we could talk to the ghosts and demons without any emotion of unearthly awe.  We could, like Don Juan, ask them to supper, and eat heartily in their company.  Dante’s angels are good men with wings.  His devils are spiteful, ugly executioners.  His dead men are merely living men in strange situations.  The scene which passes between the poet and Farinata is justly celebrated.  Still, Farinata in the burning tomb is exactly what Farinata would have been at an auto-da-fe.  Nothing can be more touching than the first interview of Dante and Beatrice.  Yet what is it but a lovely woman chiding, with sweet, austere composure, the lover for whose affection she is grateful, but whose vices she reprobates?  The feelings which give the passage its charm would suit the streets of Florence as well as the summit of the Mount of Purgatory.

The spirits of Milton are unlike those of almost all other writers.  His fiends, in particular, are wonderful creations.  They are not metaphysical abstractions.  They are not wicked men.  They are not ugly beasts.  They have no horns, no tails, none of the fee-faw-fum of Tasso and Klopstock.  They have just enough in common with human nature to be intelligible to human beings.  Their characters are, like their forms, marked by a certain dim resemblance to those of men, but exaggerated to gigantic dimensions, and veiled in mysterious gloom.

Perhaps the gods and demons of Aeschylus may best bear a comparison with the angels and devils of Milton.  The style of the Athenian had, as we have remarked, something of the Oriental character; and the same peculiarity may be traced in his mythology.  It has nothing of the amenity and elegance which we generally find in the superstitions of Greece.  All is rugged, barbaric, and colossal.  The legends of Aeschylus seem to harmonize less with the fragrant groves and graceful porticos in which his countrymen paid their vows to the God of Light and Goddess of Desire than with those huge and grotesque labyrinths of eternal granite in which Egypt enshrined her mystic Osiris, or in which Hindostan still bows down to her seven-headed idols.  His favorite gods are those of the elder generation, the sons of heaven and earth, compared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling and an upstart, the gigantic Titans, and the inexorable Furies.