Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/142

112 the world. They were men-children indeed. Compared Tasso, Ariosto, Camoëns. with our own recitals,—with even Tasso's "Jerusalem," Ariosto's "Orlando," or the "Lusiad" of Camoëns,—their voice is that of the ocean heard before the sighing of reeds along a river's brim. Nevertheless, we must note that of the few great world-poems the subjective element claims its almost equal share.

As we leave the classic garden, there stands one The "Divina Commedia." mighty figure with the archangelic flaming sword. After Dante it may be said that "the world is all before" us "where to choose." Behind him, strive as we may with renaissance and imitation, we need not and cannot return. Heine says that "every epoch is a sphinx which plunges into the abyss as soon as its problem is solved." After a thousand years of the fermentation caused by the pouring in of Christianity upon the lees of paganism, a cycle ended; the shade of Dante arose, and brooded above the deep. From his time there was light again. A climacteric epoch had expired in giving him birth. His own age became Dante, as if by one of the metamorphoses in the "Inferno." And the "Divine Comedy" is equally one with its creator. The age, the poem, the poet, alike are Dante; his epic is a trinity in spirit as in form. Its passion is the incremental heat that serves to weld antique and modern conceptions, the old dispensation and the new.