His Quotations and His Originality. 
157 
vengeance visited upon Trojans who had first wronged Greeks; 
the Odyssey is divine guidance homeward of one of the ministers 
of divine wrath; and the iEneid shows a pious Trojan impelled 
by his guardian gods to the founding of Rome. But the ef¬ 
fusions of Dante’s predecessors were none of them religious 
through and through as his was. They were of the earth earthy;. 
his was devotional — the whole duty of man. They reflected 
the culture of Athens and the glory of Rome; his the holiness 
of Jerusalem. Hence, readers at once begun to call his drama 
“ Divine. ” 
Dante’s subject is the autobiography of a soul God-guided 
beyond the bounds of time and sense. We go with that soul to 
the lowest depths, and then, as it rises de profundis , behold it. 
purified by pity and terror and soaring into the highest heaven 
of heavens. 
In thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls this pilgrim com¬ 
munes with his own heart, with his guardians and with all 
types of being from the blackest devil to the brightest seraph. 
He mingles with representatives of the seven mortal sins and 
the seven cardinal virtues [or graces], in more than seventy times 
seven differentiations, and each in its own element, either act¬ 
ing or relating his actions. The secrets of all hearts are re¬ 
vealed in words, or betrayed in deeds. No confessions of St. 
Augustine or at all priestly confessionals are to be compared with’ 
the Dantesque disclosures. 
Again, no poet before Dante had dreamed of such a wide uni¬ 
versal theatre as that he struggles through. “ The measure 
thereof is longer than the earth and broader than the sea. ” 
Milton’s writing was four centuries later, well-nigh, but Dante’s 
hell is deeper and his heaven higher than Milton’s. The toil¬ 
some sinking to the center of the earth, the plunge into the abyss; 
beyond, the struggle, often desperate, up the purgatorial moun¬ 
tain, and nine successive flights through a nine-fold heaven 
generate an impression of vas.tness and boundlessness which 
Milton has never rivaled. If then we looked no further than 
the unique religiosity and grandeur of his conception we must 
acknowledge Dante to be a great original. His theme was in 
his own judgment all his own. He thus speaks: 
