Dante paints the spirits of all the generations of men, each in their circle undergoing their allotted punishment; expiating by suffering the sins of an upper world. Virgil gave a glimpse, as it were, into that scene of retribution; Minos and Rhadamanthus passing judgment on the successive spirits brought before them; the flames of Tartarus, the rock of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, the vulture gnawing Prometheus. But with Homer and Virgil, the descent into the infernal regions was a brief episode; with Dante it was the whole poem. Immense was the effort of imagination requisite to give variety to such a subject, to prevent the mind from experiencing weariness amidst the eternal recurrence of crime and punishment. But the genius of Dante was equal to the task. His fancy was prodigious; his invention boundless; his imagination inexhaustible. Fenced in, as he was, within narrow and gloomy limits by the nature of his subject, his creative spirit equals that of Homer himself. He has given birth to as many new ideas in the _Inferno_ and the _Paradiso_, as the Grecian bard in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_.
Though he had reflected so much and so deeply on the human heart, and was so perfect a master of all the anatomy of mental suffering, Dante's mind was essentially descriptive. He was a great painter as well as a profound thinker; he clothed deep feeling in the garb of the senses; he conceived a vast brood of new ideas, he arrayed them in a surprising manner in flesh and blood. He is ever clear and definite, at least in the _Inferno_. He exhibits in every canto of that wonderful poem a fresh image, but it is a clear one, of horror or anguish, which leaves nothing to the imagination to add or conceive. His ideal characters are real persons; they are present to our senses; we feel their flesh, see the quivering of their limbs, hear their lamentations, and feel a thrill of joy at their felicity. In the _Paradiso_ he is more vague and general, and thence its acknowledged inferiority to the _Inferno_. But the images of horror are much more powerful than those of happiness; and it is they which have entranced the world. "It is easier," says Madame de Staël, "to convey ideas of suffering than those of happiness; for the former are too well known to every heart, the latter only to a few."