Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/59

Rh mere picturesqueness a subject which stands in no vital relation to himself and his times; and such epics are necessarily the most numerous.

Yet there is an intermediate class of epic, partly national, partly artificial, where the poet, conscious of a high patriotic purpose, has, like Virgil and Camoens, sung the glories of his country at their zenith; or, like Lucan, actually related contemporary history; or, like Shelley in the Revolt of Islam, bodied this forth under the veil of allegory; or, like Tasso, embalmed ere too late the feeling of an age passing away. Two great epic poets of the intermediate class have done more than this: they have preserved and expressed the sentiment of their age, its replies to the deepest questions which man can propound; have clothed these abstractions with form, colour, and music, and have lent fleeting opinion an adamantine immortality. These are Dante and Milton.

"Dante," says Shelley, "was the second epic poet, that is, the second poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived. Milton was the third." Hence Shelley in another place calls Milton "the third among the sons of light." Both these great men, in truth, versed in all the learning of their ages, and entertaining a conviction of the indefeasible truth of what they believed themselves to know which no successor will be able to share, applied themselves to embody these beliefs in works of genius. Even as great empires have vanished from the earth, and left nothing but the works of art which were not the greatness itself but merely its testimonies and symbols, so here the opinions have gone while the works remain. It almost