and the drapery is kept in motion like a flag by the vehement action of the wings.  A fifth has a face like the morning star, casting forth quivering beams.  A sixth is of a lustre so oppressive, that the poet feels a weight on his eyes before he knows what is coming.  Another’s presence affects the senses like the fragrance of a May-morning; and another is in garments dark as cinders, but has a sword in his hand too sparkling to be gazed at.  Dante’s occasional pictures of the beauties of external nature are worthy of these angelic creations, and to the last degree fresh and lovely.  You long to bathe your eyes, smarting with the fumes of hell, in his dews.  You gaze enchanted on his green fields and his celestial blue skies, the more so from the pain and sorrow in midst of which the visions are created.

Dante’s grandeur of every kind is proportionate to that of his angels, almost to his ferocity; and that is saying every thing.  It is not always the spiritual grandeur of Milton, the subjection of the material impression to the moral; but it is equally such when he chooses, and far more abundant.  His infernal precipices—­his black whirlwinds—­his innumerable cries and claspings of hands—­his very odours of huge loathsomeness—­his giants at twilight standing up to the middle in pits, like towers, and causing earthquakes when they move—­his earthquake of the mountain in Purgatory, when a spirit is set free for heaven—­his dignified Mantuan Sordello, silently regarding him and his guide as they go by, “like a lion on his watch”—­his blasphemer, Capaneus, lying in unconquered rage and sullenness under an eternal rain of flakes of fire (human precursor of Milton’s Satan)—­his aspect of Paradise, “as if the universe had smiled”—­his inhabitants of the whole planet Saturn crying out so loud, in accordance with the anti-papal indignation of Saint Pietro Damiano, that the poet, though among them, could not hear what they said—­and the blushing eclipse, like red clouds at sunset, which takes place at the apostle Peter’s denunciation of the sanguinary filth of the court of Rome—­all these sublimities, and many more, make us not know whether to be more astonished at the greatness of the poet or the raging littleness of the man.  Grievous is it to be forced to bring two such opposites together; and I wish, for the honour and glory of poetry, I did not feel compelled to do so.  But the swarthy Florentine had not the healthy temperament of his brethren, and he fell upon evil times.  Compared with Homer and Shakspeare, his very intensity seems only superior to theirs from an excess of the morbid; and he is inferior to both in other sovereign qualities of poetry—­to the one, in giving you the healthiest general impression of nature itself—­to Shakspeare, in boundless universality—­to most great poets, in thorough harmony and delightfulness.  He wanted (generally speaking) the music of a happy and a happy-making disposition.  Homer, from his large vital bosom,