In intellect and imagination, in the faculty of
discerning spirits and detecting laws, we doubt if any living novelist
is his equal; but his genius, in its creative action, has been
heretofore attracted to the dark rather than the bright side of the
interior life of humanity, and the geniality which evidently is in him
has rarely found adequate expression. In the many works which he may
still be expected to write, it is to be hoped that his mind will lose
some of its sadness of tone without losing any of its subtilty and
depth; but, in any event, it would be unjust to deny that he has
already done enough to insure him a commanding position in American
literature as long as American literature has an existence.
* * * * *
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
_Le Prime Quattro Edizioni della Divina Commedia Letteralmente
Ristampate per Cura di_ G.G. WARREN LORD VERNON. Londra: Presso Tommaso
e Guglielmo Boone. MDCCCLVIII. 4to. pp. xxvi., 748.
The zeal with which the study of Dante has been followed by students in
every country of Europe, during the last forty years, is one of the
most illustrative facts of the moral as well as of the intellectual
character of the period. The interest which has attracted men of the
most different tempers and persuasions to this study is not due alone
to the poetic or historic value of his works, however high we may place
them in these respects, but also and especially to the circumstance
that they present a complete and distinct view of the internal life and
spiritual disposition of an age in which the questions which still
chiefly concern men were for the first time positively stated, and
which exhibited in its achievements and its efforts some of the highest
qualities of human nature in a condition of vigor such as they have
never since shown.
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