I must, furthermore, beg leave to differ with the poet’s thinking it an exalted symptom on his part to hate every thing he had loved before, out of supposed compliment the transcendental object of his affections and his own awakened merits.  All the heights of love and wisdom terminate in charity; and charity, by very reason of its knowing the poorness of so many things, hates nothing.  Besides, it is any thing but handsome or high-minded to turn round upon objects whom we have helped to lower with our own gratified passions, and pretend a right to scorn them.]

[Footnote 57: 

“Tu asperges me, et mundabor,” &c.  “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”—­Psalm li. 7.]

[Footnote 58:  Beatrice had been dead ten years.]

III.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN.  Argument.

The Paradise or Heaven of Dante, in whose time the received system of astronomy was the Ptolemaic, consists of the Seven successive Planets according to that system, or the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; of the Eighth Sphere beyond these, or that of the Fixed Stars; of the Primum Mobile, or First Mover of them all round the moveless Earth; and of the Empyrean, or Region of Pure Light, in which is the Beatific Vision.  Each of these ascending spheres is occupied by its proportionate degree of Faith and Virtue; and Dante visits each under the guidance of Beatrice, receiving many lessons, as he goes, on theological and other subjects (here left out), and being finally admitted, after the sight of Christ and the Virgin, to a glimpse of the Great First Cause.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN.

It was evening now on earth, and morning on the top of the hill in Purgatory, when Beatrice having fixed her eyes upon the sun, Dante fixed his eyes upon hers, and suddenly found himself in Heaven.

He had been transported by the attraction of love, and Beatrice was by his side.

The poet beheld from where he stood the blaze of the empyrean, and heard the music of the spheres; yet he was only in the first or lowest Heaven, the circle of the orb of the moon.

This orb, with his new guide, he proceeded to enter.  It had seemed, outside, as solid, though as lucid, as diamond; yet they entered it, as sunbeams are admitted into water without dividing the substance.  It now appeared, as it enclosed them, like a pearl, through the essence of which they saw but dimly; and they beheld many faces eagerly looking at them, as if about to speak, but not more distinct from the surrounding whiteness than pearls themselves are from the forehead they adorn.[1] Dante thought them only reflected faces, and turned round to see to whom they belonged, when his smiling companion set him right; and he entered into discourse with the spirit that seemed the most