stresses inevitably suggest the methodical courses of brick and masonry, the stately rows of Doric columns or Gothic pinnacles. Every great epic is a temple in words, every nursery rhyme a structure of toy blocks, playthings of uncomprehending merriment. Carlyle was not the first writer to liken the Divine Comedy to a cathedral; but no one has ever worded it so well:
A true inward symmetry, what we call an architectural harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all; … the three kingdoms, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, look out on one another like compartments of a great edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral piled up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls!
Now in prose, and especially in fiction, which enjoys the advantage of being the most elastic of all literary forms, the architectural element is far less in evi-
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