Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/416

402 contented himself with supposing that God was somewhere or other; that the Devil and all his angels together with the perpetually increasing multitude of the damned were burning above to all eternity in that prodigious orb of elemental light, which sustains and animates that multitude of inhabited globes, in whose company this earth revolves. Others have supposed Hell to be distributed among the comets, which constitute, according to this scheme, a number of floating prisons of intense and inextinguishable fire; a great modern poet has adopted this idea when he calls a comet

Misery and injustice contrive to produce very poetical effects, because the excellence of poetry consists in its awakening the sympathy of men, which, among persons influenced by an abject and gloomy superstition, is much more easily done by images of horror than of beauty. It often requires a higher degree of skill in a poet to make beauty, virtue, and harmony poetical, that is, to give them an idealized and rhythmical analogy with the predominating emotions of his readers,—than to make injustice, deformity and discord poetical. There are fewer Raphaels than Michael Angelos; better verses have been written on Hell than Paradise. How few read the Purgatorio or the Paradiso of Dante, in the comparison of those who know the Inferno well. And yet the Purgatorio, with the exception of two famous passages, is a finer poem than the Inferno. No poet can develope the same power in that part of his composition where he feels himself in- secure of the emotions of his readers, as in those where he knows that he can command their sympathy.