With the eye of his imagination he seized objects so distinctly that he could reproduce them in sharp outline.  Thence we see before us the most abstruse and unusual, drawn, as it were, after nature.”  In recognition of the same characteristic, Coleridge says, “In picturesqueness Dante is beyond all other poets, ancient or modern, and more in the stern style of Pindar than of any other.  Michael Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of the ‘Divina Commedia.’”

Dante, eminent in poetic gifts, has many sides, but this is his strongest side:  he is preeminently a poet of form.  In his mind and in his work there is a southern, an Italian, sensuousness.  He is a poet of thought, but more a poet of molds; he is a poet of sentiment, but more a poet of pictures.  Rising readily to generalization, still his intellect is more specific than generic.  His subject—­chosen by the concurrence of his aesthetic, moral, and intellectual needs—­admits of, nay, demands portraits, isolated sketches, unconnected delineations.  The personages of his poem are independent one of the other, and are thence the more easily drawn.  Nor does Dante abound in transferable passages, sentences of universal application, from being saturated with the perfumed essence of humanity.  We say it with diffidence, but to us it seems that there is a further poetic glance, more idealized fidelity, in Milton; more significance and wisdom and profound hint in Goethe.  In Milton the mental reverberation is wider:  he rivets us through distant grand association, by great suggestion.  Thus, describing the darkened head of Satan, Milton says,—­

          “As when the sun new risen
  Looks through the horizontal misty air,
  Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon,
  In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
  On half the nations,”

Setting aside the epithets “horizontal” and “disastrous,” which are poetically imaginative, the likening of Satan to the sun seen through a mist, or in eclipse, is a direct, parallel comparison that aids us to see Satan; and it is in such, immediate, not mediate,—­not involving likeness between physical and mental qualities, but merely between physical, not between subtle, relations,—­that Dante chiefly deals, showing imaginative fertility, helpful, needful to the poet, but different from, and altogether inferior to, poetic imagination.  The mind attains to the height of poetic imagination when the intellect, urged by the purer sensibilities in alliance with aspiration for the perfect, exerts its imaginative power to the utmost, and, as the result of this exertion, discovers a thought or image which, from its originality, fitness, and beauty, gives to the reader a new delight.  Of this, the lordliest mental exhibition, there is a sovereign example in the words wherewith Milton concludes the passage—­

      “and with fear of change
  Perplexes monarchs.”

This fills the mind with the terror he wishes his Satan to inspire; this gives its greatness to the passage.