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Butler — Dante, 
“O ye who in some pretty little boat, 
Eager to listen have been following 
Behind my ship, that singing sails along, 
The sea I sail has never yet been passed.” 
Dante is original in the development as well as in the concep¬ 
tion of his theme. 
It is the first step that costs. His first step took him beyond 
this visible diurnal sphere. Henceforth his surroundings tran¬ 
scended the laws of nature. This super-human emancipation 
was not partial or transient, as in the witches of Macbeth and 
in Prospero of the Tempest, but perpetual and all-pervasive. 
When we have once been hypnotized with him, nothing seems 
improbable. Accordingly his imagination can rove and riot 
without rein or rule, 
Horace praises the adroitness with which Homer, beginning 
with things plausible, brings us by slow degrees to accept his 
fables about the Cyclops and Charybdis as not beyond possibil¬ 
ity, making his “miracula ” to seem “ speciosa. ” 
But the great Italian’s environment is miraculous from the 
start, and ignores limitations altogether. He is at home among 
monstrosities at a bound and not by gradual approach. 
Dante saw a snake tie a man as with cords, pierce him as 
with arrows, assimilate him to itself, consume him as fire burns 
paper, and restore hi m from ashes to his original shape. Again, 
he saw a troop of angels take up such a position that their 
squadrons had the forms of 35 Latin letters so as to spell the 
words, Diligite justitiam qui judicatis terram. 
But even such prodigies as these are not out of keeping with 
the unearthly tenor of our pilgrimage through the world of 
spirits. All “miracula” are “speciosa” there. 
Free from the laws of nature Dante naturally expatiated more 
freely than poets who were bound by them. With a great sum 
obtained they this freedom, but he was free-born. 
A poem confined to realms preternatural and even unnatural, 
we think must needs be deficient in human interest. 
Such a lack would be fatal. It would have brought down the 
sublime vision to the level of a maniac’s ravings, or of thos e 
every day dreams which we throw to the winds. 
This catastrophe Dante avoids by many an original device. 
