The Dante the Romantics read. Cary casts the poem in Miltonic blank verse, grand and knotty, and it was his 1814 version that first carried Dante deep into English literary life, with Coleridge lecturing on it and Keats taking it up the mountains. It is markedly archaic now, its word order twisted for the metre (“In the midway of this our mortal life”), and freer with the plain sense than a modern crib. Read Cary as a monument of early nineteenth-century English verse and for its sheer sonorous weight, not as a transparent window onto the Italian. Public domain.
The version that made Dante an English author. Cary writes Miltonic blank verse, so the mountain arrives sounding like Paradise Lost: inverted, elevated, and much further from the Italian than Longfellow. Coleridge championed it and Keats carried it on foot through Scotland. Read it for the grandeur and the history, not for closeness. Free and complete.
Cary is at his most Miltonic in the Paradiso, and at his furthest from Dante. The gain is music; the cost is visible in a single word. For the line Longfellow gives as “his will is our peace”, Cary writes “his will is our tranquillity”, which is calmer, longer, and says something quietly different about what the blessed have. Free and complete.