"I sent my soul through the invisible

Some letter of that after-life to spell;

And after many days my soul returned,

And said, 'Beheld myself am Heaven and Hell."

"Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire,

And hell the shadow of a soul on fire,

Cast on the darkness into which ourselves,

So late emerged from, shall so soon expire."

And that was written two hundred years before "The Divine Comedy."

The man must have had a remarkable mind. He saw through the devices that men invent to conceal the transitory nature of everything on earth, and he resolved to make the most of the present. In this side of character he is thoroughly Horatian. One would fancy he was reading one of the Odes when meeting these lines : -

"Here with a little bread beneath the bough,

A flask of wine, a book of verse, - and thou

Beside me singing in the wilderness, -

O, wilderness were paradise enow."