"Terrestrial remembrances pursue them still; their aimless passions
devour one another in the heart; they are moved at the past which seems
to them less irrevocable than their eternal future.

"One would say that Dante, banished from his country, has transported
into imaginary regions the pangs which devoured him. His shades
incessantly demand news from the scene of mortal existence, as the poet
himself eagerly enquires after his native country; and hell presents
itself to him in the form of exile.

"All, in his eyes, are clothed in the costume of Florence. The ancient
dead whom he invokes, seem to be born again as completely Tuscan as
himself. It was not that his mind was limited--it was the energy of his
soul, that embraced the whole universe within the circle of his
thoughts.

"A mystical chain of circles and of spheres conducts him from hell to
purgatory, from purgatory to paradise. Faithful historian of his vision,
he pours a flood of light upon the most obscure regions, and the world
which he creates in his triple poem is as complete, as animated and as
brilliant as a planet newly-discovered in the firmament.

"At his voice the whole earth assumes a poetical form, its objects,
ideas, laws and phenomena, seem a new Olympus of new deities; but this
mythology of the imagination is annihilated, like paganism, at the
aspect of paradise, of that ocean of light, sparkling with rays and with
stars, with virtues and with love.

"The magic words of our great poet are the prism of the universe; all