I cannot dismiss this part of the subject without advising every person who can muster sufficient Italian to read the simile of the sheep, in the third canto of the Purgatorio.

I think it the most perfect passage of the kind in the world, the most imaginative, the most picturesque, and the most sweetly expressed.
No person can have attended to the Divine Comedy without observing how little impression the forms of the external world appear to have made on the mind of Dante.

His temper and his situation had led him to fix his observation almost exclusively on human nature.

The exquisite opening of the eighth* canto of the Purgatorio affords a strong instance of this.
(I cannot help observing that Gray's imitation of that noble line "Che paia 'lgiorna pianger che si muore,"-- is one of the most striking instances of injudicious plagiarism with which I am acquainted.

Dante did not put this strong personification at the beginning of his description.