Mihi est propositum in taberna mori—­

and Andrea de Basso’s terrible “Ode to a Dead Body,” in fifteenth-century Italian; which utters, with extraordinary power, the ascetic thought of the Middle Age, dwelling with a kind of gloomy exultation on the foulness of the human frame in decay.

In the preface to his “Italian Poets,” Hunt speaks of “how widely Dante has re-attracted of late the attention of the world.”  He pronounces him “the greatest poet for intensity that ever lived,” and complains that his metrical translators have failed to render his “passionate, practical, and creative style—­a style which may be said to write things instead of words.”  Hunt’s introduction is a fine piece of critical work.  His alert, sparkling, and nimble intellect—­somewhat lacking in concentration and seriousness—­but sensitive above all things to the picturesque, was keenly awake to Dante’s poetic greatness.  On the other hand, his cheerful philosophy and tolerant, not to say easy-going moral nature, was shocked by the Florentine’s bitter pride, and by what he conceives to be his fanaticism, bigotry, superstition, and personal vindictiveness, when

  “Hell he peoples with his foes,
  Dark scourge of many a guilty line.”

Hunt was a Universalist, and Dante was a Catholic Calvinist.  There was a determined optimism about Hunt, and a buoyancy as of a cork or other light body, sometimes a little exasperating to men of less sanguine temperament.[22] He ends by protesting that Dante is a semi-barbarian and his “Divine Comedy” too often an infernal tragedy.  “Such a vision as that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no better than the dream of an hypochondriacal savage.”  It was some years before this, in his lecture on “The Hero as Poet,” delivered in 1840, that a friend of Leigh Hunt, of a temperament quite the opposite of his, had spoken a very different word touching this cruel scorn—­this saeva indignatio of Dante’s.  Carlyle, like Hunt, discovered intensity to be the prevailing character of Dante’s genius, emblemed by the pinnacle of the city of Dis; that “red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom.”  Hunt, the Universalist, said of Dante, “when he is sweet-natured once he is bitter a hundred times.”  “Infinite pity,” says Carlyle, the Calvinist, “yet also infinite rigour of law, it is so nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that she was made.  What a paltry notion is that of his ‘Divine Comedy’s’ being a poor splenetic, impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth!  I suppose if ever pity tender as a mother’s was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante’s.  But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity either.  His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic—­sentimentality, or little better. . . .  Morally great above all we must call him; it is the beginning of all.  His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love; as, indeed, what are they but the inverse or converse of his love?”