breathes like a broad fresh air over the world, amidst alternate storm and sunshine, making you aware that there is rough work to be faced, but also activity and beauty to be enjoyed.  The feeling of health and strength is predominant.  Life laughs at death itself, or meets it with a noble confidence—­is not taught to dread it as a malignant goblin.  Shakspeare has all the smiles as well as tears of nature, and discerns the “soul of goodness in things evil.”  He is comedy as well as tragedy—­the entire man in all his qualities, moods, and experiences; and he beautifies all.  And both those truly divine poets make nature their subject through her own inspiriting medium—­not through the darkened glass of one man’s spleen and resentment.  Dante, in constituting himself the hero of his poem, not only renders her, in the general impression, as dreary as himself, in spite of the occasional beautiful pictures he draws of her, but narrows her very immensity into his pettiness.  He fancied, alas, that he could build her universe over again out of the politics of old Rome and the divinity of the schools!

Dante, besides his great poem, and a few Latin eclogues of no great value, wrote lyrics full of Platonical sentiment, some of which anticipated the loveliest of Petrarch’s; and he was the author of various prose works, political and philosophical, all more or less masterly for the time in which he lived, and all coadjutors of his poetry in fixing his native tongue.  His account of his Early Life (the Vita Nuova) is a most engaging history of a boyish passion, evidently as real and true on his own side as love and truth can be, whatever might be its mistake as to its object.  The treatise on the Vernacular Tongue (de Vulgari Eloquio) shews how critically he considered his materials for impressing the world, and what a reader he was of every production of his contemporaries.  The Banquet (Convito) is but an abstruse commentary on some of his minor poems; but the book on Monarchy (de Monarchia) is a compound of ability and absurdity, in which his great genius is fairly overborne by the barbarous pedantry of the age.  It is an argument to prove that the world must all be governed by one man; that this one man must be the successor of the Roman Emperor—­God having manifestly designed the world to be subject for ever to the Roman empire; and lastly, that this Emperor is equally designed by God to be independent of the Pope—­spiritually subject to him, indeed, but so far only as a good son is subject to the religious advice of his father; and thus making Church and State happy for ever in the two divided supremacies.  And all this assumption of the obsolete and impossible the author gravely proves in all the forms of logic, by arguments drawn from the history of AEneas, and the providential cackle of the Roman geese!