that his power is to have no end,"—which we might compare with the lines of Dryden on Cromwell :

"How shall I then begin, and where conclude

To draw a fame so truly circular?

For in a round what order can be showed,

Where all the parts so equal-perfect are?"

In sculpture, more even than in painting and poetry, allegory is destructive of all true effect. Hence we rightly deem as barbarous and monstrous such sculptures as the hundred-breasted Diana of the Ephesians, the four-armed Apollo of the Lacedæmonians (though not worse than Shakespeare's "Rumour"), and the horns of Jupiter Ammon, and even the sprouting horns of Io which occur in ancient paintings, if not in sculpture. One hardly knows whether or not to include with these M. Angelo's statue of Moses, with its strange horn-like protuberances, due, I believe, to a mistranslation in the Vulgate.*

All such allegorical appendages are wanting in the best sculpture. Bacchus is never (as Lessing tells us) represented in statuary with his horns, though he is thus represented in poetry. To place a pan-pipe in the hand of Mercury, to give him winged sandals, or to arm Hercules with his club,-this is not to furnish them with allegorical appendages, but with what intrinsically belongs to them and helps to represent them in their peculiar character.

"Cornua" instead of "gloria," the original bearing both meanings.

But when we find, as we do find in an Italian statue, Truth represented as opening with her hands a deep gash in her breast, as if to show her heart to the spectator, we at once recognize the false method, and reject it no less than we reject the same in Shakespeare, who in the "Midsummer Night's Dream" makes Lysander exclaim—

"Transparent Helena ! Nature shows her art,

That through thy bosom makes me see thy heart."

Perhaps allegorical falsity never reached a more comico-tragical climax than when (as Sir Charles Eastlake tells us), in order to represent Death without his terrors, the sculptor of some Papal monument surmounted the whole with a gilded skeleton.

There is only one poet known to me who has the power of combining in one form a poetic reality and an allegorical symbol. Dante's poem is, to use the cumbrous expression of a German writer (Schelling), "an entirely unique mean between allegory and symbolic objective form." His creations are in themselves intensely real, and yet, at the same time, this very reality seems to depend on the fact that they are allegorical. Thus (as I hope to show more distinctly later) his Furies are not, as are Æschylus' Furies, realistic objects from which our senses instinctively recoil, terrible in their mere presence even amidst a natural scene, but terrible only because we have followed the poet down to hell, the home of the Furies; and having once passed that Gate of Despair,

having once accepted the fearful truth of the allegory, we feel (although conscious that it is but an allegory) the reality of the infernal scenes, and share the poet's terror at the ghastly apparition. Or consider Beatrice herself. What would she be but the little daughter of Portinari, had she not been chosen by the poet to represent Christian Theology? And yet how cold and lifeless an image would that same symbolized Theology be, were she not at the same time the real human Beatrice, whose sweet eyes, as they gave him salutation in the streets of Florence, fired the heart of Dante, and inspired him to sing of heaven and hell.

But such a creation as Beatrice is, I think, unique in art. And, as I am speaking of Dante, I cannot but mention another poetic method of this supreme master which is, I think, used with success by no other poet, and which is to some extent of the same character as what has just been described. I mean the method of seizing and simply naming or describing a feeling the exact feeling which underlies what he wishes us to conceive, "Many of his comparisons," says Macaulay, " are intended to give an exact idea of feelings under particular circumstances."

Now this is a very common mode of expression in everyday conversation; and in a poet's description it seems both easy and ineffectual to say, e.g., that a man looked "very angry" or "very happy," and so on. It needs poetic power, and that of the highest kind, to so exactly seize the one underlying

feeling that the whole character or scene which the poet wishes us to conceive shall be brought vividly before us by that one touch. The greatest ever lies nearest to the easiest, the sublime to the ridiculous; and when this common method, which we use perhaps a hundred times a day in our conversation, is used supremely well, it is one of the most wonderful acts of the poetic imagination; for the poet has seized, and set before us in a word, the inmost idea of the thing, round which the artistic form at once clusters itself, instead of building up, however grandly or vividly, the form in order to represent the idea.

The following examples will perhaps make these ill-expressed thoughts more intelligible; although, without a knowledge of the context, the wonderful effect of the words may be scarcely perceptible.

Of the angel who comes to quell the crew of furious fiends on the ramparts of the Fiery City, and to open the city gate,-a glorious shape, advancing in dignity across the marsh and waving aside the gross darkness with his left hand,—the following words seem to me to give a conception far grander and more vivid than could volumes of description :

"And he spake no word to us; but looked like one Whom other care urges and incites than that of him who is before him."

Again, in order to give us a picture of the Virgin at the moment of the Annunciation, he says

"And in her face she had this expression stamped
'Behold the handmaid of the Lord,' as distinctly
As any figure stamps itself in wax."

And of the announcing angel he says

"Beatitude seemed written on his face."

If you will read the cantos in which these passages occur, you will, if I am not mistaken, perceive in what an extraordinary manner these apparently commonplace expressions descriptive of a feeling are master-strokes of genius revealing the idea.

I shall now pass on in order to briefly consider two matters connected with the form of words used by the poet; these are the questions of metrical expression and rhyme.

Coleridge says, with great plausibility, that the true antithesis lies not between poetry and prose, but between poetry and science. This holds true in many cases. Poetry and metrical language are by

no

means convertible terms: so that though there is of course a distinction in the form of words between verse and prose, there is very often true poetry in an unmetrical and true prose in a metrical form, and the antithesis does not lie between the metrical and the unmetrical.

We must, however, go deeper than the mere outward form.

The thought of the poet, the way in which he grasps and models his subject before he attempts