Come al orlo dell'acqua d'un fosso
Stan gli ranocchi pur col muso fuori,
Sì che celano i piedi, e l'altro grosso.—Inf. 22.[116]

It must be said, that most of these images, though by no means all, occur in the Inferno; and that the poet means to paint sin not merely in the greatness of its ruin and misery, but in characters which all understand, of strangeness, of vileness, of despicableness, blended with diversified and monstrous horror. Even he seems to despair of his power at times:

S'io avessi le rime e aspre, e chiocce,
Come si converrebbe al tristo buco,
Sovra 'l qual pontan tutte l'altre rocce;
Io premerrei di mio concetto il suco
Più pienamente; ma perch'io non l'abbo,
Non senza tema a dicer mi conduco:
Che non è 'mpresa da pigliare a gabbo
Descriver fondo a tutto l'universo,
Nè da lingua, che chiami mamma, o babbo.—Inf. 32.[117]

Feeling the difference between sins, in their elements and, as far as we see them, their baseness, he treats them variously. His ridicule is apportioned with a purpose. He passes on from the doom of the sins of incontinence—the storm, the frost and hail, the crushing weights—from the flaming minarets of the city of Dis, of the Furies and Proserpine, "Donna dell'eterno pianto," where the unbelievers lie, each in his burning tomb—from the river of boiling blood—the wood with the Harpies—the waste of barren sand with fiery snow, where the violent are punished—to the Malebolge, the manifold circles of Falsehood. And here scorn and ridicule in various degrees, according to the vileness of the fraud, begin to predominate, till they culminate in that grim comedy, with its dramatis personæ and battle of devils, Draghignazzo, and Graffiacane, and Malacoda, where the peculators and sellers of justice are fished up by the demons from the boiling pitch, but even there overreach and cheat their tormentors, and make them turn their fangs on each other. The diversified forms of falsehood seem to tempt the poet's imagination to cope with its changefulness and inventions, as well as its audacity. The transformations of the wildest dream do not daunt him. His power over language is nowhere more forcibly displayed than in those cantos, which describe the punishments of theft—men passing gradually into serpents, and serpents into men:

Due e nessun l'imagine perversa
Parea.—Inf. 25.

And when the traitor, who murdered his own kinsman, was still alive, and seemed safe from the infamy which it was the poet's rule to bestow only on the dead, Dante found a way to inflict his vengeance without an anachronism:—Branca D'Oria's body, though on earth, is only animated by a fiend, and his spirit has long since fled to the icy prison.[118]

These are strange experiments in poetry; their strangeness is exaggerated as detached passages; but they are strange enough when they meet us in their place in the context, as parts of a scene, where the mind is strung and overawed by the sustained power, with which dreariness, horror, hideous absence of every form of good, is kept before the imagination and feelings, in the fearful picture of human sin. But they belong to the poet's system of direct and forcible representation. What his inward eye sees, what he feels, that he means us to see and feel as he does; to make us see and feel is his art. Afterwards we may reflect and meditate; but first we must see—must see what he saw. Evil and deformity are in the world, as well as good and beauty; the eye cannot escape them, they are about our path, in our heart and memory. He has faced them without shrinking or dissembling, and extorted from them a voice of warning. In all poetry that is written for mere delight, in all poetry which regards but a part or an aspect of nature, they have no place—they disturb and mar; but he had conceived a poetry of the whole, which would be weak or false without them. Yet they stand in his poem as they stand in nature—subordinate and relieved. If the grotesque is allowed to intrude itself—if the horrible and the foul, undisguised and unsoftened, make us shudder and shrink, they are kept in strong check and in due subjection by other poetical influences; and the same power which exhibits them in their naked strength, renders its full grace and glory to beauty; its full force and delicacy to the most evanescent feeling.

Dante's eye was free and open to external nature in a degree new among poets; certainly in a far greater degree than among the Latins, even including Lucretius, whom he probably had never read. We have already spoken of his minute notice of the appearance of living creatures; but his eye was caught by the beautiful as well as by the grotesque.

Take the following beautiful picture of the bird looking out for dawn: