throws a farther and whiter and a broader light than Dante.  Nor does Dante’s page glisten, as Shakespeare’s so often does, with metaphor, or compressed similes, that at times with a word open the spiritual sphere; not super-imposed as cold ornament, but inter-tissued with the web of thought, upflashings from a deep sea of mind, to quiver on the surface, as on the calm level of the Atlantic you may see a circuit of shining ripple, caused by schools of fish that have come up from the wealth in the depths below to help the sun to glisten,—­a sign of life, power, and abundance.

Like his great compeer, Milton, Dante fails of universality from want of humor.  Neither had any fun in him.  This was the only fault (liberally to interpret Can’s conduct) that Dante’s host, Can Grande of Verona, had to find with him.  The subjects of both poets (unconsciously chosen perhaps from this very defect of humor) were predominantly religious, and their theology, which was that of their times, was crude and cruel.  The deep, sympathetic earnestness, which is the basis of the best humor, they had, but, to use an illustration of Richter, they could not turn sublimity upside down,—­a great feat, only possible through sense of the comic, which, in its highest manifestation of humor, pillows pain in the lap of absurdity, throws such rays upon affliction as to make a grin to glimmer through gloom, and, with the fool in “Lear,” forces you, like a child, to smile through warmest tears of sympathy.  Humor imparts breadth and buoyancy to tolerance, enabling it to dandle lovingly the faults and follies of men; through humor the spiritual is calm and clear enough to sport with and toss the sensual; it is a compassionate, tearful delight; in its finest mood, an angelic laughter.

Of pathos Dante has given examples unsurpassed in literature.  By the story of Ugolino the chords of the heart are so thrilled that pity and awe possess us wholly; and by that of Francesca they are touched to tenderest sympathy.  But Ugolino is to Lear what a single fire-freighted cloud that discharges five or six terrific strokes is to a night-long tempest, wherein the thundering heavens gape with a hundred flashes.

All the personages of Dante’s poem (unless we regard himself as one) are spirits.  Shakespeare, throughout his many works, gives only a few glimpses into the world beyond the grave; but how grandly by these few is the imagination expanded.  Clarence’s dream, “lengthened after life,” in which he passes “the melancholy flood,” is almost super-Dantesque, concentrating in a few ejaculative lines a fearful foretaste of trans-earthly torment for a bad life on earth.  And the great ghost in “Hamlet,” when you read of him, how shadowy real!  Dante’s representation of disembodied humanity is too pagan, too palpable, not ghostly enough, not spiritualized with hope and awe.