Than imaginary journeys through the realms beyond the grave, which were so much the vogue with the religious writers of the day,—­and literature then was chiefly, almost exclusively, religious,—­no more broad or tempting canvas could be offered to a poet, beset, as all poets are apt to be, with the need of utterance, and possessed, moreover, of a graphic genius that craved strong, glowing themes for its play.  The present teeming world to be transfigured into the world to come, and the solicitation and temptation to do this brought to a manly, powerful nature, passionate, creative, descriptive, to a stirring realist, into whose breast, as a chief actor on the Italian scene, ran, all warm from the wheels of their spinning, the threads of Italian politics at the culmination of the papal imperial conflict; and that breast throbbing with the fiery passions of republican Italy, while behind the throb beat the measure of a poetic soul impelled to tune the wide, variegated cacophony.  Proud, passionate, and baffled, the man Dante deeply swayed the poet.  Much of his verse is directly woven out of his indignations and burning personal griefs.  At times, contemporaneous history tyrannized over him.

Dante’s high and various gifts, his supreme poetic gift, the noble character and warm individuality of the man, with the pathos of his personal story, the full, lively transcript he hands down of the theology and philosophy of his age, his native literary force as molder of the Italian language, his being the bold, adventurous initiator, the august father of modern poetry—­all this has combined to keep him and his verse fresh in the minds of men through six centuries.  But even all this would not have made him one of the three or four world-poets, would not have won for him the wreath of universal European translation.  What gave his rare qualities their most advantageous field, not merely for the display of their peculiar superiorities, but for keeping their fruit sound and sweet, was that he is the historian of hell, purgatory, and heaven—­of the world to come such as it was pictured in his day, and as it has been pictured more or less ever since—­the word-painter of that visionary, awful hereafter, the thought of which has ever been a spell.

Those imaginations as to future being—­to the Middle Ages so vivid as to become soul-realities—­Dante, with his transcendent pictorial mastership, clothed in words fresh and weighty from the mine of popular speech, stamping them with his glittering imperial superscription.  Imaginations! there are imaginations of the future, the reverse of poetical.  Hunger will give you tormenting imaginations of breakfasts and dinners; avarice enlivens some minds with pictures of gains that are to be.  But imaginations of the life beyond the grave, these we cannot entertain without spirituality.  The having them with any urgency and persistence implies strong spiritual prepossessions:  men must be self-possessed with their higher self,