world above him but God alone on whom to cast the responsibility of his works, not a word may be taken away for the purpose of quotation, as not a word could have been added to it by Dante or by Ezekiel himself. But about the eternity of his damnation there is not, happily for the human conscience, any manner of doubt possible; it must endure as long as the poem which proclaims it: in other words, as long as the immortality of poetry itself.
This great and terrible poem, the very crown or coping-stone of all the Châtiments, has a certain affinity with two others in which the poet's yearning after justice and mercy has borne his passionate imagination as high and far as here. In Sultan Mourad his immeasurable and incomparable depth of pity and charity seems well nigh to have swallowed up all sense of necessary retribution: it is perhaps because the portentous array of crimes enumerated is remote in time and place from all experience of ours that conscience can allow the tenderness and sublimity of its inspiration to justify the moral and ratify the sentence of the poem:—
Viens! tu fus bon un jour, sois à jamais heureux.
Entre, transfiguré! tes crimes ténébreux,
O roi, derrière toi s'effacent dans les gloires;
Tourne la tête, et vois blanchir tes ailes noires.
But in the crowning song of all the great three cycles every need and every instinct of the spirit may find the perfect exaltation of content. The vast and profound sense of ultimate and inevitable equity which animates every line of it is as firm and clear as the solid and massive splendour of its articulate expression. The date of it is outside and beyond the lapse of the centuries of time; but the rule of
