"
He had reached the high altar where the miracle of transubstantiation is
wrought, itself also a type of the great conversion that may be
accomplished in our own nature (the lower thing assuming the qualities of
the higher), not by any process of reason, but by the very fire of the
divine love.
"Then there smote my mind
A flash of lightning wherein came its wish."[251]
Perhaps it seems little to say that Dante was the first great poet who
ever made a poem wholly out of himself, but, rightly looked at, it
implies a wonderful self-reliance and originality in his genius. His is
the first keel that ever ventured into the silent sea of human
consciousness to find a new world of poetry.
"L'acqua ch' io prendo giammai non si corse."[252]
He discovered that not only the story of some heroic person, but that of
any man might be epical; that the way to heaven was not outside the
world, but through it. Living at a time when the end of the world was
still looked for as imminent,[253] he believed that the second coming of
the Lord was to take place on no more conspicuous stage than the soul of
man; that his kingdom would be established in the surrendered will. A
poem, the precious distillation of such a character and such a life as
his through all those sorrowing but undespondent years, must have a
meaning in it which few men have meaning enough in themselves wholly to
penetrate.
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