Page images
PDF
EPUB

the power actually ruling must be conceived of as in many respects independent of this will. In all such states there is defect not merely in the character of a people, but in the very aim and scope of the political establishment. In this case it is plain that changes are required-that another purpose of governing must be admitted, namely, that of the utmost public welfare. It must be there considered as a question, in what manner a constitution may be improved, and it must be understood that, however slowly it may take place, there is a change to be held continually in view, towards which at all times progress shall be making. To such nations the whole scheme of political institution is thrown open to discussion; but, in speculative inquiries, we reason without regard to one form of institution or another. We consider actual governments as offering illustration merely of theoretical principles; and, in any discussions we pursue, we inquire absolutely what is the basis of power, what the condition of liberty, how a state is made free, how it is made secure. The theory is at all times ideal, and relating to the supposition of what might be attained, if all impediments were removed. is not supposed that the theory can in any instance be applied directly to the situation of any individual state, but it is presumed that the principles established in theory must enlighten the practical study of the actual condition and improvement of every nation.

It

DANTE AND MILTON.

THE mind of Dante was not formed for the muses only; it took share in the passions of the agitated times to which he belonged. His native republic was shaken by civil dissensions, and he, ardent and eager in political feeling as in his own art, a zealous and faithful citizen, suffered in the troubles of the state from the revenges of faction, and lived the life of a man engaged in the angry contests of the state, not in study. With fortunes confiscated, and long condemned to the exile in which he died, he looked to that Florence, from which he was estranged by persecuting hate, with the passionate feelings of an outcast son; and this temper, which should seem to have no part in the solemn incantations of the poet who sung of heaven, and purgatory, and hell, blends itself with the inspiration of his austere and lofty genius. He seems to have forsaken earth by the subject of his poem; but his terrestrial loves and hates accompany him whithersoever he aspires or descends, and that earth which he had left re-appears alike in Paradise and in the abysses of eternal punishment. It could not have been thought that one of the greatest works of poetical genius should be stamped throughout with the personal and perishing affections of a private man ; in which the subject, the most vast and illimit

able with which the powers of the human mind can contend, should be swallowed up in the expression of transitory and local passions. Yet, by the extraordinary combination of powers in one mind, we find that the poetical ability which could produce a language almost out of darkness ;—an imagination which could travel secure and unfaltering in the utmost heights and depths that can be opened to human thought ;a strong dark faith in the dreams of early superstition;—an intellect severe, sagacious, and searching;and political and personal animosities, the most passionate, bitter, and unrelenting; and, on the other hand, affections the most warm, and gentle, and tender, may be all combined in one mind and in one work; imparting to it a character which nothing resembles, and which is at once august by its subject, and by the power of genius it displays, and fearful by the strong pictures of human passion and crime which he only could have drawn, who, with the same mind, could feed on the fears and wonders of imagination, and mix as an actor and sufferer in the stern and bitter realities of life.

The illustrious Poet of our own country, who has embraced in one poem the same vast subject, though with events which make it still vaster,-combining together the fall of celestial spirits, the creation of the world, and the entire destiny of mankind,-shows how like passions may be divided, and similar (in some respects) elements of the mind held in separation. For he too took part in the political passions and troubles of his country; he too suffered, and the fierce animosities of personal life held strong possession of that mind, which, when following its genius, passed out from this world, and left the clouds and

griefs of this" dim spot," to open up to itself and to us a world of feelings and beings remote in the greatest degree from all personal and transitory thoughts.

The character of Milton may therefore be placed in comparison with that of Dante, both in respect of their resemblance and dissimilarity. They are alike in their high and even stern intellectual power; in solemnity of imagination; in their subject, not only in itself, but as taking its origin in both from the religious cast of their whole mind; in patriotism and love of liberty; in moral zeal; in the influence of speculative opinion upon personal character and conduct; since both acted upon principles, and were actuated by desires framed in the height of their souls, in meditative feeling and impassioned thought. They are, perhaps, unlike in this, that the personal affections of Dante were far more ardent than those of Milton; so that his genius itself was subject to them; but of Milton, perhaps, it were more truly said, that his affections were subject to his genius. Hence, in that respect in which we are best able to Work of each, we find, with many marks of affinity of mind, this decisive opposition of character, that the work of Dante is over-run with personal feelings, and that of Milton is almost entirely pure from them. The result is, that the one is regarded as a production strange and anomalous, in which, though the extraordinary power of genius displayed by the author abashes and silences all censure, yet we feel that, in order to admire, we are obliged to forego all our ordinary principles of judgment; and that we look on the work in part only as a poem, and in part as the exhibition of a singular individual character, and as

compare them, the great

the historical record of the temper and even facts of the times. But that of Milton is the model of all that is great and awful in his art; a poem entirely sublime, into which we enter only to feel the utmost dilatation of all our faculties and powers; and are transported out of the narrowness and bonds of ordinary existence into worlds of pure power, glory, and beauty. In reading the poem of Dante there is often, almost always, a painful sense of the oppression which our strong human passions lay upon the great powers of our souls. In reading that of Milton, there is felt a sudden exemption from that bondage, an enlargement of the paths of the spirit, a wafting, a flight into the regions of its uncontrolled liberty and power. The poem of Milton bears its rank among the other mightiest works of human genius; it contends with them on their own principles, and it excels them in the greatness on which their own claims are founded; and has illustrated in the highest degree the laws by which the human mind proceeds in its highest efforts.

Even the history of their lives may be thought to owe its diversity of character to the same cause which has made their poems thus unlike. That ungoverned zeal of affection hurried Dante into personal quarrels, exasperating against himself the animosities of faction, and its virulent persecutions; while the loftier and more regulated genius of Milton, attaching itself, in the main, to a great public cause rather than to persons, though it joined to the rise and fall of that cause the advancement and declension of his private fortunes, yet left him free from the danger of that bitter and deadly rancour which is provoked by those who mix personal feuds with public hostility.

« PreviousContinue »