Foremost among his creations of this class stands Prometheus, half fiend, half redeemer, the friend of man, the sullen and implacable enemy of heaven.  Prometheus bears undoubtedly a considerable resemblance to the Satan of Milton.  In both we find the same impatience of control, the same ferocity, the same unconquerable pride.  In both characters also are mingled, though in very different proportions, some kind and generous feelings.  Prometheus, however, is hardly superhuman enough.  He talks too much of his chains and his uneasy posture; he is rather too much depressed and agitated.  His resolution seems to depend on the knowledge which he possesses that he holds the fate of his torturer in his hands, and that the hour of his release will surely come.  But Satan is a creature of another sphere.  The might of his intellectual nature is victorious over the extremity of pain.  Amidst agonies which cannot be conceived without horror, he deliberates, resolves, and even exults.  Against the sword of Michael, against the thunder of Jehovah, against the flaming lake, and the marl burning with solid fire, against the prospect of an eternity of unintermitted misery, his spirit bears up unbroken, resting on its own innate energies, requiring no support from anything external, nor even from hope itself.

To return for a moment to the parallel which we have been attempting to draw between Milton and Dante, we would add that the poetry of these great men has in a considerable degree taken its character from their moral qualities.  They are not egotists.  They rarely obtrude their idiosyncrasies on their readers.  They have nothing in common with those modern beggars for fame who extort a pittance from the compassion of the inexperienced by exposing the nakedness and sores of their minds.  Yet it would be difficult to name two writers whose works have been more completely, though undesignedly, colored by their personal feelings.

The character of Milton was peculiarly distinguished by loftiness of spirit; that of Dante by intensity of feeling.  In every line of the Divine Comedy we discern the asperity which is produced by pride struggling with misery.  There is perhaps no work in the world so deeply and uniformly sorrowful.  The melancholy of Dante was no fantastic caprice.  It was not, as far as at this distance of time can be judged, the effect of external circumstances.  It was from within.  Neither love nor glory, neither the conflicts of earth nor the hope of heaven, could dispel it.  It turned every consolation and every pleasure into its own nature.  It resembled that noxious Sardinian soil of which the intense bitterness is said to have been perceptible even in its honey.  His mind was, in the noble language of the Hebrew poet, “a land of darkness, as darkness itself, and where the light was as darkness.”  The gloom of his character discolors all the passions of men, and all the face of nature, and tinges with its own livid hue the flowers of Paradise and the glories of the eternal throne.  All the portraits of him are singularly characteristic.  No person can look on the features, noble even to ruggedness—­the dark furrows of the cheek, the haggard and woful stare of the eye the sullen and contemptuous curve of the lip—­and doubt that they belong to a man too proud and too sensitive to be happy.