OF THE 
 
 University of California. 
 
 GIF^T OF 
 
 Accession 96092 Class %^ 
 
THE 
 
 
DANTE ALIGHIERI. (RAPHAEL.) 
 
ABOUT DANTE 
 
 AND HIS 
 
 "BELOVED FI.ORENCE" 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCES FENTON SANBORN 
 
 Dante . . . The bard 
 Whose genius spangled o'er a glowing theme 
 With fancies thick as his inspiring stars. 
 
 William Wordsworth. 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 THE WHITAKER AND RAY COMPANY 
 
 (incorporated) 
 
 1901 
 
Copyright, 1901, 
 
 by 
 
 Frances Fenton Sanborn. 
 
TO 
 
 E. D. S. 
 
 WHO GREETS THE NEW CENTURY 
 
 IN 
 
 THAT "DIVINER AIR" 
 
 OP 
 
 THE PARADISO 
 
 96092 
 
TO DANTE. 
 
 O STAB of morning and of liberty ! 
 O bringer of the light, whose splendor shines 
 Above the darkness of the Apennines, 
 Forerunner of the day that is to be ! 
 
 The voices of the city and the sea, 
 The voices of the mountains and the pines, 
 Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines 
 Are footpaths for the thought of Italy ! 
 
 H. W. Longfellow. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 There was never a better time than the beginning 
 of the twentieth century for the study of Dante, the 
 '' Divine Poet." The eve of Good Friday of the year 
 1901 A.D. completes the seven hundredth year since 
 he started, as he tells us in his immortal poem, the 
 Divina Commedia. on a journey to the land of spirits, 
 soon finding as his guide his beloved Virgil, who con- 
 ducted him through the Inferno and the Purgatorio 
 until he met his early love, Beatrice, who led him on 
 to the Paradiso. 
 
 In Italy, and throughout Christendom, the poet's 
 fame increases. 
 
 In Florence, his birthplace, a revival of the public 
 readings of his works is established. In the opening 
 address, the honorable syndic expressed his warm 
 satisfaction at "the relighting of this votive lamp,^^ 
 and in behalf of the anniversary of the freedom of 
 Italy he proposed "that the audience sends its greet- 
 ing to King Humbert, in the name of Dante, — a name 
 typical of Italian worthiness and virtues." 
 
 How it would have softened his anguished heart in 
 exile, could he have heard with prophetic ear this 
 eulogium, coming centuries after his lofty soul had 
 won its own paradise. The Antiquarian Society library 
 teems with Dantean literature. Though as yet tin- 
 canonized by the Church which he loved, the hum- 
 bler classes speak his name with reverence. They 
 know the sufferings in song, if they cannot read the 
 
 9 
 
10 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 poem of the great martyr. His place is sure while 
 the beautiful hills keep guard over his birthplace, and 
 the bright waters of the Arno reflect the soft blue of 
 an Italian sky to mirror its sunlight and starlight. 
 
 One can learn to know and love the study of Dante 
 without a knowledge of the Italian language. There 
 are innumerable English translations of his great 
 poem, and masterly commentaries accessible in public 
 libraries. Gladstone's bookseller had orders to fur- 
 nish him copies of everything published concerning 
 Dante. 
 
 The brilliant productions of the essayists, Carlyle, 
 Emerson, Macaulay, Lowell, Stedman, Norton, Ros- 
 setti, and a score of others, with hundreds of com- 
 mentators, show the enthusiastic gleaning of the 
 fields of Dantesque lore. 
 
 Thanks to them one and all {even to the spirits of 
 just men made perfect) for the rich repast to which 
 they welcome us. Lovingly, lingeringly, we sip and 
 feast, and would fain, in this little book, point to 
 others the alluring way. 
 
 The poet Tennyson and Edward Fitz Gerald, walk- 
 ing together one morning in Regent Street, stopped 
 before a shop window to look at the busts in marble 
 of Goethe and Dante side by side. After some 
 minutes in silence, Fitz Gerald turned to his friend, 
 saying, "What is it in Dante's face that is wanting in 
 Goethe's?" — ^^ The Divine,'^ was Tennyson's instant 
 reply. To the '^Divine PoeV^ we invite our readers. 
 
 F. F. S. 
 
ABOUT DANTE 
 
 AND HIS "BELOVED FLORENCE." 
 
 CANON FARRAR, IN A LECTURE ON DANTE. 
 
 If any young men are in my audience, I invite 
 them to hold high a perpetual companionship with 
 such souls as this; and if there are those who have 
 found delight in meaner things, I would hope that 
 by taking to the study of Dante they might be in- 
 duced to turn away from such folhes, and breathe the 
 pure, eager air of the great and immortal poet. He 
 is one of the landmarks of history. Those who know 
 it best wish others to share the knowledge of that 
 verse, whose magnanimity has power to inspire the 
 faint-hearted, whose tenderness has overcome sullen- 
 ness and assuaged perplexity, and of which it has 
 been truly said, that when once we have held con- 
 verse with its grandeur, our souls can never seem 
 small again. 
 
 11 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 12 ABOUTTOJTfEAND HIS 
 
 FLORENCE. 
 
 " I am glad you are going to Florence. It is a delightful 
 spot from which to watch the spring. The greening hills 
 around the dome of Bellosguardo (which has not been alto- 
 gether ruined, I trust) are never to be forgotten." — Letter from 
 Annie Fields. 
 
 Never could " the greening hills " have come for- 
 ward more luxuriantly, nor the enchanting panorama 
 of Florence have unfolded more bewitcliingly, than 
 in a dreamy, blossoming month of April when it 
 greeted the writer after a winter's voyaging around 
 the historic Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Sicily 
 and Malta, the Nile, Palestine, and Greece. And it 
 was the beloved home of our Daftte. 
 
 It were not wise to attempt comparisons between 
 the noted cities and sights of these countries bor- 
 dering on the " Great Sea." All have their charms; 
 but, surely, in the kingdom of Italy, Florence, " The 
 Beautiful," reigns as its crown of rejoicing. 
 
 What wonder that the great poet, whose eyes were 
 
 familiar with scenes of beauty, such aS Bellosguardo, 
 
 Fiesole, Certosa, and San Miniato, should, when in 
 
 frenzied longings for his "beloved Florence," have 
 
 coined into immortal verse the visions of his celestial 
 
 Paradiso. 
 
 Of all the cities of the earth, 
 
 None is so fair as Florence. 'T is a gem 
 
 Of purest ray, and what a light broke forth 
 
 When it emerged from darkness. 
 
 Rogers. 
 
 We cannot deplore the mediaeval ages which gave us 
 the Divina Commedia. Had Dante lived even so late 
 
"beloved FLORENCE." 13 
 
 as Savonarola, the world would have lost it. These 
 mighty spirits seem to walk the streets and rule 
 Florence " from their urns." We see Dante's majes- 
 tic form among the august signoria, and we listen 
 for the trumpet-tones of the priest from the pulpit 
 of the Duomo. The cloisters of San Marco are a 
 shrine in which every devotee of religious liberty 
 finds inspiration. 
 
 The pilgrim lover of Dante in Florence will get 
 his pleasure in a minor key, so far as satisfactory 
 relics can be found, or traces of his early youth and 
 boyhood. But who can imagine Dante ever a boy 
 among boys, — full of fun, marbles, balls, and kites, 
 eating green almon'ds, and staining his lips with the 
 rich juice of the vineyards? We like to think of him 
 pensive, handsome, but pale, with deep brown eyes, 
 that studied the stars and dreamed, — a meditative, 
 bookish boy. 
 
 One incident of his boyhood is authenticated. While 
 playing around the old church of San Giovanni, where 
 the Baptistery now stands, a companion of Dante's 
 fell into the font ! Dante sprang to his rescue with 
 such vehemence that he broke the marble ! 
 
 In this font Dante was baptized, for it is as old 
 as the Basilica, which had its first walls built on the 
 ruins of a temple dedicated to Mars. From Dante's 
 day to the present, all the CathoUc infants born in 
 Florence must be christened there, whether of high 
 or low birth. 
 
 Very few of the great repubUc of travelers fail to 
 visit Florence, and if they have read the Divine 
 Comedy and learned to know the "Great Floren- 
 
14 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS "BELOVED FLORENCE." 
 
 tine," they will find intense pleasure in meeting so 
 many representations of his strong features in busts, 
 engravings, paintings, and statuettes. 
 
 Dante's House is not easy to find. It is in the 
 old town, — No. 2, Via Dante Alighieri, — and is close 
 pressed upon by stone houses of the same style and 
 height. The street is so narrow that the dayhght 
 comes in sparingly, and one must hug the walls as 
 he walks, to escape a passing dray. In Dante's day 
 his home was as fine as his neighbors', and he was 
 a prominent figure among them. 
 
 An inscription, in ItaUan, over the front door says: 
 " In this house was horn the immortal poet, Dante Ali- 
 ghieri. It is open to the public, Wednesday, Saturday, 
 and Monday, from eleven a.m. to three p.m.'^ 
 
 On those days the street door level with the pave- 
 ment stands open. A stairway ascends abruptly from 
 the entrance. It is narrow, steep, and inclosed by 
 walls on both sides. At the top, a very small land- 
 ing confronts you with only one turn, and that to the 
 left through a passage only wide enough for one. 
 On your right, a door stands open, where a polite 
 custodian receives you, if not engaged with other visi- 
 tors. This is the front room, and spans the entire 
 width of the house, yet is a small room. It is hghted 
 by two front windows, well guarded with inside and 
 outside blinds and the typical lattice-work over the 
 glass, giving the appearance of prison gratings. 
 
 There are very few relics of Dante's personal effects, 
 — a tattered flag, two large keys, an hour-glass, his 
 coat of arms, framed, and a painting of a Madonna. 
 
II 
 
 
 
 'fg- 
 
 ■f*^^^.gp-5-^>, 
 
 
 :V- 
 
 ; f^ 
 
 i 
 
 THE HOUSE WHERE DANTE WAS BORN AND LIVED UNTIL HIS 
 BANISHMENT. 
 
ABOUT DANTE AND HIS "BELOVED FLORENCE." 17 
 
 A desk with a glass cover may have been his own. 
 There is his bust by Dupre, very fine; a portrait by 
 Giotto; a medalUon Hkeness, the work of Pietro Lom- 
 bardo. There is a small framed engraving of Dante 
 and Beatrice together, — he with a scornful upper lip, 
 Beatrice evidently indignant or pouting. Another fine 
 Beatrice is a bust by Lodini. Of course, all repre- 
 sentations of her are ideal. 
 
 A room opening out of this front room was per- 
 fectly dark. The custodian said, "Dante was born 
 in this room, — in this room!^^ 
 
 Very near the Dante house stands the palatial one 
 of the Portinari family, to which Beatrice belonged. 
 In the court '^ Daniels Corner ^^ is shown, where he 
 ventured to watch for her coming to take her daily 
 exercise, attended by her vigilant duenna, — a pretty 
 child of eight years when he saw her at a May party 
 in her father's house (he only nine), yet this uncon- 
 scious Beatrice was to become the passion of his hfe 
 and the inspiration of his genius till apotheosized 
 by his muse in the Paradiso of his immortal poem. 
 
 There is, also, in the room sacred to Dante, an 
 engraving of the tomb at Ravenna, some of his ashes, 
 a wreath of leaves, and a piece of white tape the 
 exact measurement of Dante's head. There is the 
 mask, or one of them, the Countess Sforza must have 
 held on to to the one that she took from Tacca so 
 slyly. 
 
 Professor Giuliani, celebrated for his commentaries 
 upon the Divina Commedia, has deposited in this room, 
 sacred to Dante's memory, his entire collection of 
 Dantean literature. It fills two large book-cases. The 
 
18 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 custodian showed us illuminated copies of the poem, 
 albums, and some beautiful illustrations by Phoebe 
 Traquar, the notes by John S. Black. Professor Whyte 
 used these notes in his classes at St. George's Free 
 Church, Edinburgh, Scotland. 
 
 Near-by Dante's House is the little church of San 
 Martino, where he and Gemma were married. We 
 went into it, and stood near the altar, with closed eyes, 
 trying to conjure up the scene of that bridal party. 
 We should like a picture of the handsome bride, 
 Gemma, in quaint costume, — but far more of the 
 sober bridegroom, — as they pledged their faith for 
 time and eternity. 
 
 Dante took his wife to his father's home, where 
 they lived until his banishment. Six children were 
 born to the inheritance of this glorious ancestry. 
 
 The Tower of Dante, overlooking his house, is of the 
 thirteenth century, named in his honor. Dante must 
 have watched the beginnings of the grand Duo mo. 
 But a short few years passed before his banishment, as 
 its corner-stone was laid in 1298. The dreadful decree 
 that drove him from home, wife, children, and all that 
 he held dear, except his honor, was issued in 1301. 
 
 Who can say that he did not watch the building of 
 that dome from the battlements of heaven? 
 
 The builder's fame is eternal. " Brunelleschi's 
 Dome," it is called by the English visitor, and always 
 the Duomo by the Italians. One does not ask for the 
 Cathedral ! 
 
 The interior of the Duomo is very impressive. One 
 of the popes — Pius IX. — said, "/n aS^^. Peter^s, man 
 thinks; in the Duomo, one prays. ^^ 
 
19 
 
 Dante was a prominent figure among the citizens 
 who met on the lounging-places of the piazzas to talk 
 over public affairs, and much there was to discuss, for 
 those were troublous times in Florence. 
 
 "Banters Seat,^^ on the piazza of the Duomo, is marked 
 by a slab of stone set in the wall of a building on the 
 south, opposite the Campanile. 
 
 The stone in Florence still revered, 
 Called Dante's. A plain flat stone, scarce discerned 
 From others in the pavement, whereupon 
 He used to bring his great chair out ; turned 
 To Brunelleschi's church, and pour alone 
 The lava of spirit when it burned ; 
 It is not cold to-day. A passionate 
 Poor Dante, who, a banished Florentine, 
 Didst sit, austere, at banquets of the great. 
 And muse upon this far-off stone of thine. 
 And think how oft some passer used to wait 
 A movement in the golden day's decline, 
 With '' Good night, dearest Dante." Well, good night. 
 
 Mrs. Browning, in '* Casa Guidi Windows." 
 
 Mrs. Browning passionately loved Italy and Flor- 
 ence, where she lived most of the time from September, 
 1845, the date of her marriage, to June, 1861, when she 
 died at her house, Casa Guidi, so well known by her 
 poem. On the wall of this house is a marble slab 
 with an inscription, in Italian, commemorating her 
 virtues and her verse, placed there by the municipaUty 
 of Florence. Her grave is in the old Protestant Ceme- 
 tery (there is a very large, more modern ground), but 
 the old spot is well kept up, with neat walks, shrub- 
 bery, fine shading trees, and parterres of flowers. It 
 is a place where lovers of Mrs. Browning's poetry 
 
20 ABOUfT DANTE AND HIS "BELOVED FLORENCE." 
 
 will come to pay their homage. The sarcophagus in 
 which her delicate form rests was designed by Robert 
 Leighton. It has the lihes of Florence, and figures of 
 poetry and its sister arts. The monument rests upon 
 a broad base, closely caressed by the fresh, green grass, 
 dotted with pink and white daisies. There are lilies and 
 evergreens around, and some English men of letters 
 rest very near, — Rogers, Landor, Trollope, and the 
 poet Clough. 
 
 Dante's statue in the loggia of the Uffizi Gallery 
 (by Demi) is fine and all-satisfying. The niches of 
 the long colonnade are adorned with sj;atues of the 
 distinguished Florentines, artists, men of letters, 
 poets, scientists, warriors, statesmen, — an illustrious 
 company, whom Dante honors. Michael Angelo is 
 there, Petrarch, Da Vinci, Donatello, Galileo, Cellini, 
 Boccaccio. 
 
 Dante's pose is magnificent, — in his right hand he 
 holds a book; the left arm rests upon a lyre. The 
 countenance portrays a majesty Uke a god. We did not 
 see in it so much the tragedy as the power of life. 
 
 James Russell Lowell says of it: " There is one 
 figure before which every scholar, every man who 
 has been touched by the tragedy of life, lingers with 
 reverent steps. . . . The haggard cheeks, the lips 
 clamped together in unfaltering resolve, the scars of 
 Ufe's long battle, and the brow whose stern outline 
 seems the trophy of final victory, — this, at least, is a 
 face that needs no name beneath it. This is he who 
 among Uterary fames finds only two that for growth 
 and immutabiUty can parallel his own. . . . The suf- 
 frages of highest authority woilld now place him second 
 
DANTE ALIGHIERI. 
 
*\ B R A R p* 
 
 ^ OF THE 
 
 ITY 
 
 UNIVER 
 
ABOUT DANTE AND HIS " BELOVED FLORENCE." 23 
 
 in that company, where he, with proud humility, 
 took the sixth place." {Inferno, canto iv.) 
 
 The Dante statue in the piazza of Santa Croce has 
 been a good deal criticised, but it has a fine effect of 
 dignity. It stands on a lofty pedestal, wrapped in a 
 Roman toga. He seems looking down on the moving 
 populace, who swarm over that piazza, half-scornfully, 
 half-mournfully. The four corners of the pedestal 
 have carvings of the lions of Florence. The city made 
 high carnival the day of its unveiling in 1865. The 
 dignitaries gave a succession of grand festivals, and 
 Dante had come at last unto his own. 
 
 There is a curious fresco picture of Dante on the 
 north aisle wall of the Duomo, done by Domenico 
 di MichelUno in 1465. It seems that a Frate An- 
 tonio, a passionate lover of the Divina Commedia, had 
 permission to read and expound it to the people in 
 the Duomo. He thought it a great pity that he could 
 not show a statue or picture of the great poet at the 
 same time, and so proposed to the magnates who con- 
 trolled affairs, that one should be painted. They chose 
 Michellino, who has made rather a queer thing of it. 
 
 Poor, dear Giotto had been buried and monumented 
 himself for a century, or he might have had the com- 
 mission. 
 
 The painting is allegorical. A structure, pyramidal 
 in form, sets forth the poem in progress from the 
 Inferno to the Paradiso. Dante stands out in bold 
 rehef, pointing to this object with one hand; in the 
 other he holds his book open toward the spectator. It 
 is not, assuredly, in very good taste. 
 
 On the right of the picture is a view of the city of 
 Florence. 
 
24 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS "BELOVED FLORENCE." 
 
 A monument to Dante was placed within the church 
 of Santa Croce about the same time. This church is the 
 Pantheon of Florence. Michael Angelo and Galileo are 
 buried there, and Dante should have been, and would 
 have been, if Florence had repented and done her first 
 works centuries ago. Surely, Ravenna's claim is 
 stronger. 
 
 The known friendship between Giotto and Dante 
 associates their names so closely, that the searcher after 
 Dante's footprints most naturally looks up everything 
 pertaining to Giotto, and he finds treasures of value 
 untold. 
 
 To the Bargello chamber he wends his way. Those 
 famous frescoes well hold their own. "The Paradiso," 
 in which Dante is introduced walking in a procession, 
 covers one side of the wall. The figures are high up, 
 and we were glad of the services of the custodian, with 
 his long wand, to point them out. 
 
 This done, it seemed as though our Dante's presence 
 illumined the whole scene. Corso Donati and his 
 tutor, Brunetto Latini, walk by his side; then there are 
 hundreds of figures of dukes, cardinals, angels. 
 
 The " Bargello " was so named from the ofl&cer or 
 captain of justice under whose administration the 
 great palace was placed. The room which holds 
 Giotto's picture is now called the Chapel of Mary 
 Magdalena. The entire building was formerly a court 
 of justice and a prison, but is now a national museum, 
 and one not the least among the many vast reposi- 
 tories of high art in Florence. 
 
 Giotto's "Inferno" is painted over the entrance of 
 the chapel. It represents Satan in the attitude given 
 
THE BARGELLO DANTE. BY GIOTTO. 
 
"THE 
 
 OF 
 
 ^NlVERs/TV 
 
 i£jt 
 
 OF 
 
 iEPRH\K 
 
ABOUT DANTE AND HIS "BELOVED FLORENCE." 27 
 
 him by Dante in the thirty-fourth canto of the Inferno, 
 and would be a terrifying picture to the spectator if 
 the colors had not been well subdued by " Time's 
 effacing fingers." 
 
 Dante's face and figure made strong points for an 
 artist. 
 
 In the Bargello picture, he is represented as a youth, 
 a blossom of pomegranate in his hand, and on his head 
 a soft hood or cap falling gracefully over the back of 
 the neck. 
 
 This fresco is the earliest picture of Dante known. 
 It was lost to sight for five hundred years. Some of 
 Dante's enemies had whitewashed it so thoroughly, 
 that they believed it entirely obliterated. 
 
 Posterity owes an immense debt of gratitude to three 
 gentlemen who devoted much arduous labor to rescue 
 it from obHvion: Mr. Kirkup, an Englishman; Henry 
 Wilde of the United States; and Mr. Aubrey Bezzi, an 
 Italian. 
 
 Carlyle says of another portrait of Dante: '' Lonely 
 there, painted as on vacancy, with the simple laurel 
 wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain, the 
 known victory which is also deathless; significant of 
 the whole history of Dante. I think it is the mourn- 
 f ulest face that ever was painted from reality, — an 
 altogether heart-affecting face." 
 
 Dante is represented by Boccaccio as a man of aus- 
 tere habits, and of meager diet, even when not at the 
 tables of those who made him feel how hard it was 
 to eat their bread. Can Grande of Verona was the 
 host who drew forth this bitter wail from the great 
 exile. (Paradiso, csLuto-KYii.) 
 
28 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 Dante was usually reticent and reserved, even 
 haughty, among strangers; but with his peers (who 
 were they?) his talk was unconstrained, his language 
 as keenly poHshed as in his writings, and he was 
 polite, though often sarcastic and self-asserting. 
 
 Dante's face in youth was handsome, — 
 
 " The clear, grave face that looked on Beatrice." 
 
 In later years it was strong, heavily marked. He 
 had a prominent under lip, aquiline nose. His crisp, 
 curly, black hair, wrinkled, swarthy skin, and sorrow- 
 set expression would easily have provoked the shrugs 
 and whisperings on the street corners, as, absorbed in 
 meditation deep, profound, he passed along with head 
 bent down, "There is the man who has been in Hell!" 
 So realistic was the imagery of the Great Poet. 
 
 There are many of Giotto's paintings in Santa Croce 
 and the church of Santa Maria Novella. 
 
 Ruskin has expatiated largely and eloquently upon 
 these in his charming little book. Mornings in Florence. 
 Some of them retain the original coloring; others are 
 retouched occasionally. 
 
 One needs a good glass, good eyes, a strong head 
 and determined purpose, if he would come to know 
 them well. Neck and brain will tire long before the 
 will assents to relinquish the delight of studying Old 
 Masters on vaulted walls. How these great beings 
 retained their own eyes and seven senses up aloft 
 on ladders at such dizzy heights is a marvel. 
 
 In the library of the Doge's Palace, Venice, are pic- 
 tures by Giotto on parchment. One is a scene in the 
 Paradiso, of Beatrice attended by angels. Giotto sur- 
 
"BELOVED FLORENCE." 29 
 
 vived Dante, his beloved friend, long enough to have 
 known his great poem, and how he must have prized it. 
 Dante has immortalized the great painter in the 
 Purgatorio, canto xi.: — 
 
 In painting, Cimabue thought that he 
 Should hold the field ; now Giotto has the cry. 
 
 Longfellow's Translation. 
 
 Cimabue had been the first to discover the genius of 
 the little shepherd-boy drawing with chalks on the 
 stones of the fields in Fiesole. All the world knows 
 his history now, and is grateful. Cimabue was never 
 jealous of his rival, when the brilHant pupil broke 
 away from the conventionalities of the Byzantine 
 school of painting, and made his own style, as every 
 genius must do. The first work that gave him pre- 
 cedence among all painters of those times was the 
 crucifix over the door of the Church of San Marco in 
 Florence. It is painted in tempera, on a background 
 of gold. 
 
 What a procession of immortals from Cimabue and 
 Giotto down! 
 
 The Florence school needs fear no rival. Conscious 
 those gifted beings were of their own powers. The 
 artist magnified his oflSce, and feared neither the frown 
 nor courted the favor of king or potentate. 
 
 A perpetual stimulus to the genius of the Florentine 
 artists (Venetian as well) lay in the hearty apprecia- 
 tion of their work by the common people, as well as 
 by their peers and the throne. A new picture to be 
 unveiled, the entire populace would claim its right to 
 assist at the sight. So in the palmy days of Greece, a 
 
30 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 new poem or a fine statue was welcomed with laurel 
 wreaths. Such encouragement warms the heart of 
 the sculptor, painter, and poet. 
 
 When Cimabue's most celebrated Madonna was 
 brought in 1280 to a chapel in the Church of Santa 
 Maria Novella (where it is now guardedly shown as 
 the greatest treasure), it was brought in great state, 
 with banners, flags, grandees in gorgeous robes, and 
 crowds in procession following. It was a gala day. 
 The name of the street where the artist had his home 
 and studio was changed to Allegro ("rejoicing"). 
 
 When Michael Angelo was leaving Florence to " lift 
 the dome of St. Peter's in the air," he turned for a 
 final look at the Duomo, saying, " Better than that I 
 cannot do; copy it I never will.^' 
 
 Dante's friend Giotto wrought its chaste font for 
 holy water. His monument is in the Duomo. 
 
 No one city of Italy, or of the world, combines so 
 many works of Old Masters in painting, sculpture, a nd 
 architecture as Florence. To the Church, its popes, 
 cardinals, and dukes, that appreciated and encouraged 
 them, and that has preserved them in fit settings in 
 galleries and churches, the world owes everlasting 
 gratitude. And the world comes in crowds, year by 
 year, increasingly, to admire and adore. And ever 
 associated with these masterpieces are the bright- 
 flowing Arno, the picturesque bridges, the white statues 
 on street corners, the broad piazzas, the charming 
 Cascine with its embowered walks, the gay shops and 
 stone palaces of the Lung Arno, the hospitalities of 
 its foreign residents, and over all the luminous blue 
 of an Italian sky. 
 
GIOTTO. 
 
ABOUT DANTE AND HIS "BELOVED FLORENCE." 33 
 
 The marvelously beautiful gates of the Baptistery, 
 wrought chiefly by the artist Ghiberti, were pronounced 
 by Michael Angelo worthy to be " the gates of Para- 
 dise." Dante never saw them, nor did he live to see 
 the Campanile and its exquisite bas-reUefs, the work 
 of his friend Giotto. How it would have pleased him!" 
 
 From the beginning of Giotto's career, Dante had 
 helped the shepherd-boy. As he rose in fame he grate- 
 fully looked to his poet friend for suggestions for his 
 themes, and proudly painted the portraits of his 
 patron, then in the zenith of his power and influence. 
 
 Heaven-born geniuses both, yet how different their 
 last years of life, — Giotto, courted, petted by princes, 
 kings, cardinals, and popes, every touch of his brush 
 in demand at lavish compensation, basking in lux- 
 ury and sunshine; poor Dante, shivering, hungry, 
 leaving — 
 
 All things most dear to him, ere long to know 
 How salt another's bread is, and the toil 
 Of climbing up and down another's stairs. 
 
 Paradiso, canto Ivii. 
 
34 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 FROM AN ESSAY BY DEAN CHURCH. 
 
 In Dante, a youth dreamed through in the sweetest 
 of Italian homes, a manhood spent in effort in the 
 most stirring and revolutionary of Italian common- 
 wealths, an old age dragged through in wanderings 
 and hopeless exile, learning all the shapes and secrets 
 of wickedness, of weakness, of pain, to be found in that 
 wild scene which Christendom then presented, — in 
 Dante, all this made up the man who wrote the Divine 
 Comedy. It was no mere magnificent literary pro- 
 duction of imaginative genius; it was as real as the 
 man. His life-blood was in it. . . . 
 
BELOVED FLORENCE." 35 
 
 FROM BYRON'S "CHILDE HAROLD." 
 
 Ungrateful Florence ! Dante sleeps afar, 
 Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore ; 
 Thy factions, in their worse than civil war. 
 Proscribed the bard whose name for evermore 
 Their children's children would in vain adore 
 With the remorse of ages ; and the crown 
 Which Petrarch's laureate brow supremely wore. 
 Upon a fair and foreign soil had grown, 
 
 His life, his fame, his grave, though rifled — not thine own 
 Happier Ravenna ! on thy hoary shore, 
 Fortress of falling empire ! honor'd sleeps 
 The immortal exile ! Arcque, too, her store 
 Of tuneful relics proudly claims and keeps, 
 
 While Florence vainly begs her banish 'd dead, and weeps. 
 
36 • ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 PART I. 
 
 Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, in the month 
 of May, 1265 A.D. Of his ancestry little is known, 
 except what may be traced from a few passages in 
 his epic poem, the greatest ever written, except the 
 Iliad and Milton's Paradise Lost. That the Divine 
 Comedy came out of the mists of the Middle Ages, 
 and was written in the language of the people, never 
 before so dignified, adds immensely to its greatness. 
 He gave his country a beautiful language for all suc- 
 ceeding ages, and to posterity a mine of gold from 
 which the alloy melts away as commentators and 
 critics lower the shafts, uncover the veins, and apply 
 the fierce heat in the crucibles. How glows the living 
 ore! 
 
 Nature, art, science, religion, philosophy, history, 
 Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, with pretty much all 
 else conceivable, go to the making of his poem. We 
 chant the Miserere in the Inferno, breathe again on 
 the mountain top of the Purgatorio, and glide into the 
 enchantments of the Paradiso, beguiled, charmed into 
 sympathy with the tenderest love-story, in which 
 Dante's Beatrice has become his ministering spirit, 
 and through his genius has been apotheosized in the 
 very heaven of heavens itself. 
 
 Dante was of good ancestral bearings, and felt his 
 blue blood. He was proud of his crest, — a wing of 
 gold upon a field of azure, — the family name, Alighieri, 
 signifying " wing-bearer." His father was an advocate, 
 
"beloved FLORENCE." 37 
 
 with a prominent position in Florentine affairs. The 
 times were volcanic, and needed strong men at the helm. 
 
 Dante's mother (his father's second wife) is known 
 to us only by her first name, Bella, but we know that 
 she was a woman of education and refinement. She 
 died while her boy was young. She had placed him 
 under the best teachers, and personally watched and 
 instructed him. Who knows but that it was a spark 
 from her own genius that kindled her son's into im- 
 mortal flame? 
 
 Dante's father assumed the care and oversight of 
 his boy's education after the death of his wife. 
 
 The indulgent father accompanied his little son at a 
 May Day festival given by Ser Polco Fortinari, a 
 neighbor and special friend. The party was made for 
 the host's little daughter, Beatrice, then about eight 
 years old. No record is given of La Signora Fortinari. 
 Perhaps Beatrice was motherless, like Dante, who was 
 then nine years old. 
 
 The little girl was a beauty, probably " Queen of the 
 May," and dressed in white like an angel. The vision 
 took immediate possession of the soul, head, and heart 
 of the remarkable boy; in common parlance, he fell 
 desperately in love at first sight. He rarely saw her 
 while they were children, or in later years; but she 
 was the inspiration of his muse. 
 
 Beatrice married young, and died at the age of 
 twenty-four, her lover worshiping and faithful to her 
 memory even unto death. 
 
 Dante's teacher, Ser Brunetto Latini, was one of the 
 most learned men in Florence. Unfortunately, he died 
 
38 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 when Dante was only fifteen years of age, but their 
 mutual admiration and friendship is eloquently told 
 in the Inferno, canto xv. 
 Ser Brunetto to Dante: — 
 
 If thou thy star do follow, 
 Thou can'st not fail thee of a glorious port 
 If well I judged in the life beautiful. 
 And if I had not died so prematurely, 
 Seeing Heaven thus benignant unto thee, 
 I would have given thee comfort in the work. 
 
 Dante to Brunetto: — 
 
 In my mind is fixed, and touches now 
 My heart, the dear and good paternal image 
 Of you when in the world from hour to hour 
 
 You taught me how a man becomes eternal ; 
 And how much I am grateful while I live 
 Behooves that in my language be discerned. 
 
 Longfellow's Translation. 
 
 At parting, after much more conversation, his dear 
 old teacher said, — 
 
 ** Commended unto thee be my Tesoro 
 In which I still live, and no more ask." 
 Then he turned around, and seemed to be of those 
 Who at Verona run for the Green Mantle 
 Across the plain ; and seemed to be among them 
 The one who wins, and not the one who loses. 
 
 Ibid., Trans. 
 
 Ser Brunetto wrote the Tesoro at Paris, wholly in 
 French, because, he says, he was in France, and be- 
 cause the speech was more delectable and more com- 
 mon to all people. 
 
 Brunetto wrote the Tesoretto, a poem which some 
 
"beloved FLORENCE." 39 
 
 commentators think gave Dante hints for the Divina 
 Commedia, but the learned Abbate Zannoni, who edited 
 it, says, " If any one thinks so, it must have been a 
 slight and almost invisible spark kindling a vast con- 
 flagration." 
 
 Dante studied for a time in the universities of 
 Bologna, Padua, and Paris, and took rank among the 
 most learned. As a poet he had no rival but Petrarch. 
 The title ^^ Poeta'^ was affixed to his name at its 
 enrollment. 
 
 Inheriting a fortune, he Raturally found his place 
 among the chivalry of Florence during the wars so 
 incessantly waged between the Italian states. We 
 know from his poem that he was present at the battle 
 of Campaldino and at the evacuation of Capraia. 
 
 Proud and aristocratic as was Florence, she de- 
 manded that her statesmen should honor the ranks 
 before she would honor them; consequently, every 
 Florentine, before holding office under government, 
 was obliged to enter one of the arts or guilds. 
 There were seven of these guilds, the priors of which 
 constituted the supreme administrative council. Ac- 
 cordingly, in the year 1295, Dante, having reached the 
 required age,- — thirty years, — entered the art of drug- 
 gists. It was the sixth among the privileged arts. It 
 traded in the spices, precious jewels, and rare things of 
 the Orient, as well as in every known and unknown 
 drug, strictly so called. 
 
 The family of the Medici took its name from the 
 guild of physicians, in which it had served. 
 
 Florence had become, in Dante's time, a magnificent 
 
40 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 city. It was surrounded by walls. Within were costly 
 churches and elegant palaces, and for three miles out- 
 side, and over the slopes of those beautiful hills of 
 Fiesole, San Miniato, Certosa, and Bellosguardo, were 
 castellated mansions and luxurious villas, and charm- 
 ing gardens with all manner of trees and shrubbery, 
 fruit and flowers. There was much wealth and much 
 ostentation. 
 
 From those commanding heights the views of 
 Florence with its flowing Arno were unsurpassed for 
 beauty in all Italy. The most prominent and lofty 
 object was the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, ninety 
 metres in height. It still overtops all others. It sur- 
 mounts the palace, called in Dante's time and at the 
 present day the Signoria, as that was the name of the 
 magistracy holding the reins of government. In this 
 august body of officials, small but select, sat Dante, 
 after he was made prior in 1300. 
 
 This Hall of Magistracy is one of the most interest- 
 ing buildings in Florence, if one would study from its 
 paintings and architecture the history of the state. 
 One is shown the seats of the Grand Priors, the hall 
 where Savonarola was kept prisoner, and passed his 
 last night before execution, which took place in the 
 open piazza before the palace. A fine bust of Dante 
 was placed in one of the grand apartments in 1865 — 
 the six hundredth anniversary of his birth. Around the 
 bust are grouped the banners of the Italian cities, and 
 on a handsome door are portraits of Dante and 
 Petrarch. In a little chapel painted by Ghirlandajo, 
 before the crucifix over the altar, Savonarola took his 
 last communion. 
 
"beloved FLORENCE." 41 
 
 The building is rich in paintings, statuary, frescoes, 
 mosaics, cabinets, treasures, and infinite associations 
 of the olden times. 
 
 The nobility of Florence was in a state of deadly 
 hostility when Dante came into power. There were 
 two equally powerful factions, named Guelfs and 
 Ghibellines. Their spite had burst into flame on 
 account of a lover's quarrel ending in the assassina- 
 tion of the gay cavalier Buondelmonte, who had 
 transferred his devotion from his fiancee^ a lady of 
 the family of Amadei, to one of the Donati. 
 
 Dante says of this old feud: — 
 
 O Buondelmonte, how in an evil hour 
 Thou fled'st the bridal at another's promptings ! 
 Many would be rejoicing, who are sad, 
 If God had thee surrendered to the Ema 
 The first time that thou earnest to the city. 
 
 Paradiso, canto xvi. 
 
 The place of the rioting and murder of Buondel- 
 monte was on the Ponte Vecchio, the most picturesque 
 of the seven bridges over the river Arno. It seems 
 this gay cavalier was mounted on a milk-white steed, 
 clothed in a white mantle, one Easter morning, return- 
 ing from a visit to the villa of the Bardi, beyond the 
 Arno, and had just approached the foot of the bridge 
 when a throng of friends of the deserted bride rushed 
 upon him, dragged him down, and killed him there, at 
 the foot of the "mutilated statue of Mars." 
 
 Dante's father was a Guelf, and Dante joined that 
 party, which supported the interests of the Church. 
 
42 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 His ancestors were twice banished by the Ghibellines. 
 His own banishment took place while the Guelfs were 
 in power, which, according to the veracity of Boccaccio, 
 turned him from his own party to become a Ghibelline. 
 
 There were also, in Florence, rival parties among the 
 nobility, called Bianchi (white) and Neri (black). 
 The Bianchi party took its name from a daughter, 
 Bianca, of the Cancellieri family. Her lovers quar- 
 reled, and so the old, old story of love and jealousy 
 made Florence a hotbed of faction. 
 
 The Neri and Bianchi were alternately in power. 
 At one time, the Neri being in full possession of the 
 government, Dante, with some others of the Bianchi 
 party, went to Rome to intercede with Pope Boniface. 
 Their suit was unsuccessful, a decree of banishment 
 was issued against them, their property confiscated. 
 Some of them returned, but Dante was too proud to 
 bend the knee for pardon, and he never saw his "be- 
 loved Florence" again. He wandered from place to 
 place and court to court for nineteen years. During 
 this time he wrote his Divine Poem. He died in the 
 care of a generous friend, the Lord of Ravenna, Guido 
 di Polenta, the father of the Francesca da Rimini 
 whose story is so vividly and touchingly told in the 
 fifth canto of the Purgatorio. 
 
 Dante is the poet of Italy. Petrarch, his only rival, 
 wrote some as fine sonnets, for he wrote ten times as 
 many, but Petrarch could never have written the 
 Divine Comedy, if even an epic at all. 
 
 Canon Farrar pronounced three poets only as en- 
 titled to the rank of seer as well as bard, — iEschylus, 
 
"BELOVED FLORENCE." 43 
 
 Dante, and Milton, — and Dante in a supreme degree 
 above the others. 
 
 J. A, Symonds calls Homer, Dante, Milton, ''the 
 triune spirits of epic song." 
 
 We need have no disputes over Homer. He is be- 
 yond our ken, and there may have been many Homers, 
 but the world of critics delights in comparisons and 
 contrasts between Dante and Milton. Why not let 
 them stand side by side in their glorious inspired 
 Christian epics? 
 
44 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 ON A BUST OF DANTE. 
 By H. W. Parsons. 
 
 See from this counterfeit of him 
 
 Whom Arno shall remember long, 
 How stern of lineament, how grim, 
 
 The Father was of Tuscan song. 
 There but the burning sense of wrong. 
 
 Perpetual care, and scorn abide ! 
 Small friendship for the lordly throng, 
 
 Distrust of all the world beside. 
 
 O Time, whose verdicts mock our own, 
 
 The only righteous Judge art thou ! 
 That poor old exile, sad and lone, 
 
 Is Latium's other Virgil now ! 
 Before his name the nations bow. 
 
 His words are parcel of mankind, 
 Deep in whose heart, as on his brow, 
 
 The marks have sunk of Dante's mind. 
 
 E. C. Stedman calls this entire poem of seven stan- 
 zas *' perhaps our finest American lyric." 
 
DANTE. BBONZB BUST. 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 
ABOUT DANTE AND HIS "BELOVED FLORENCE." 47 
 
 PART II. 
 
 THE VITA NUOVA (The New Life). 
 
 This is the earliest published work known to have 
 been written by Dante. Dante Gabriel Rossetti ad- 
 dresses it in — 
 
 A Sonnet. 
 
 As he that loves oft looks on the dear form, 
 
 And guesses how it grew to womanhood, 
 
 And gladly would have watched the beauteous bud 
 
 And the mild fire of precious life wax warm, 
 
 So I, long bound within the threefold charm 
 Of Dante's love sublimed to heavenly mood. 
 Had marveled touching his beatitude, 
 
 How grew such presence from man's shameful swarm — 
 At length, within this book, I found portrayed 
 New-born, that Paradisal love of his, 
 
 And simple like a child, with whose clear aid 
 I understood. To such a child as this, 
 
 Christ, charging well his chosen ones, forbade 
 
 Offense ; for " Lo ! of such my kingdom is." 
 
 Letter from James Russell Lowell to Professor Charles 
 Eliot Norton. 
 
 "I am very glad that you are translating the Vita 
 Nuova. It is the best possible introduction to a trans- 
 cendental understanding of the Divina Commedia. 
 What an extraordinary threefold nature was that of 
 Dante. The more you study him, the more sides you 
 find, and yet the ray from him is always pure white 
 light. I learn continually to prize him more as a 
 man, poet, artist, moralist, and teacher. Without him 
 
48 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 there were no Italy; and the Italian commentators 
 forever twitching at his sleeve and trying to make 
 him say he is of their way of thinking. Of their way, 
 indeed! One would think he might be free of them, at 
 least, in Paradise. He becomes daily more clear and 
 more mysterious to me. What a web a man can 
 weave out of his life, if a man be only a genius.** 
 
 Professor Norton*s translation of the Vita Nuova is 
 admirably done. It is a charming little book, to be 
 read over and over again with delight. 
 
 He says: "So long as there are lovers in the world, 
 and so long as lovers are poets, this first and tenderest 
 love-story of modern literature will be read with 
 appreciation and responsive sympathy. 
 
 The Vita Nuova is the story of the love through 
 which even in Dante's youth heavenly things were 
 revealed to him, and which in the bitterest trials of 
 life, in disappointments, poverty, and exile, kept his 
 heart fresh with springs of perpetual solace. It was 
 this love which led him through the hard paths of 
 philosophy and up the steep ascents of Faith, out of 
 the Inferno and through Purgatory, to the glories of 
 Paradise and the fulfillment of Hope. 
 
 From the May festival in the year of our Lord 1274, 
 Dante's Vita Nuova began for him, but he did not tell 
 the world of it until fifteen years later, when the death 
 of his idol had made all light go out from his life. 
 
 He had worshiped at her shrine nine long years 
 before she graciously accorded him a salutation, when 
 walking on the street between two other ladies. This 
 scene so agitated him that his slumbers were disturbed 
 by terrific dreams. 
 
"beloved FLORENCE." 49 
 
 Dante dreamed that he saw Beatrice in the arms of 
 a lord of terrible aspect, no other than Love, who held 
 in his hand Dante's own heart on fire, and showing it 
 to the maiden just awaking from sleep, he made her 
 eat the fearful thing; then Love carried her away 
 towards heaven, wrapped in a crimson robe. 
 
 When Dante awoke from this remarkable dream, 
 he resolved to ask the poets to explain it, and to this 
 end he would address them in a sonnet, as he had 
 already the art of rhyme. 
 
 In canto ii. of the Purgatorio (Longfellow's trans- 
 lation), Dante addresses his friend Casella thus: — 
 
 "My own Casella! . . . 
 If some new law take not from thee 
 Memory or practice of the song of love, 
 Which used to quiet in me all my longings, 
 Thee may it please to comfort therewithal 
 Somewhat this soul of mine, that with its body 
 Hitherward coming is so much distressed." 
 
 Forthwith began he so melodiously, 
 The melody within me still is sounding. 
 My master, and myself, and all that people 
 Which with him were, appeared as satisfied 
 As if naught else might touch the mind of any. 
 We all were moveless and attentive 
 Unto his notes. 
 
 With exquisite courtesy Casella was moved to sing 
 Dante's own sonnet (Professor Norton's translation, in 
 the Vita Nuova ) : — 
 
 All of my thoughts concerning Love discourse, 
 And have in them so great variety, 
 
50 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 That one to wish his sway compelleth me, 
 Another madly parleys of his force, 
 One hoping, bringeth unto me delight. 
 
 Another maketh me ofttimes lament ; 
 
 Only in craving Pity they consent. 
 
 Trembling with fear that in my head hath site. 
 Thus know I not from which my theme to take. 
 
 I fain would speak, and know not what to say, 
 
 In such perplexities of love I live. 
 
 And if with all to make accord I strive, 
 I needs unto my very foe must pray, 
 
 My lady Pity, my defense to make. 
 
 Milton, in a sonnet to Henry Lawes, says : — 
 
 Casella, whom he woo'd to sing. 
 
 Met in the milder shades of Purgatory. 
 
 In speaking of Plato's " Hymn of Love," in The 
 Banquet, Ralph Waldo Emerson calls it "the love 
 which Dante says Casella sang among the angels in 
 Paradise, and which as rightly celebrated in its gene- 
 sis, fruition, and effect might well entrance the soul." 
 
 Emerson's putting Dante's Casella to sing a love- 
 song among the angels of the Paradiso must be attrib- 
 uted to his sublimated sphere of thought, — pure 
 sestheticismi Elsewhere he accuses Dante of aven- 
 ging, in the Inferno, all his private wrongs in vindic- 
 tive melodies. 
 
 Dante was so great a sufferer from his unrequited 
 passion, that he came to be at ease in the presence of 
 ladies only when Beatrice was not present. Meeting 
 a group of fair ones one day, they began to rally him 
 upon his gayety in their presence and great sadness 
 
51 
 
 whenever Beatrice approached. As he could not make 
 them understand his Platonic explanations, he decided 
 to address them collectively. 
 
 Canzone {Prof. C. E. Norton's Translation). 
 
 First Part. 
 Ladies that have intelligence of Love, 
 I of my lady wish with you to speak ; 
 Not that I can believe to end her praise, 
 But to discourse that I may ease my mind ; 
 I say that when I think upon her worth. 
 So sweet doth Love make himself feel to me, 
 That if I^then should lose not hardihood. 
 Speaking, I should enamor all mankind. 
 And I wish not so loftily to speak 
 As to become, through fear of failures, vile. 
 But of her gentle nature I will treat 
 In manner light compared with her desert 
 (Ye loving dames and damsels), with you. 
 For 't is nothing of which to speak to others. 
 
 From the Vita Nuova (Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Translation). 
 
 She went along, crowned and clothed with such 
 humility, showing no whit of pride in all that she 
 heard and saw, and when she had gone by it was said 
 of many, "This is not a woman, but one of the beauti- 
 ful angels of Heaven," and there were some said, 
 "This is surely a miracle. Blessed be the Lord who 
 hath power to work thus marvelously." 
 
 Sonnet. 
 
 My lady looks so gentle and so pure 
 When yielding salutation by the way. 
 That the tongue trembles and has naught to say ; 
 
 And the eyes which fain would see may not endure. 
 
52 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 And still amid the praise she hears secure 
 She walks with humbleness for her array ; 
 Seeming a creature sent from Heaven to stay- 
 On Earth, and show a miracle made sure. 
 She is so pleasant in the eyes of man, 
 That through the sight the inmost heart doth gaze : 
 A sweetness which needs proof to know it by. 
 And from between her lips there seems to move 
 A soothing essence that is full of love, 
 Saying forever to the spirit, "Sigh ! " 
 
 From the Vita Ndova (C E. Norton's Translation). 
 
 It may be that some persons entitled to have every 
 doubt cleared away may have been perplexed at my 
 speaking of Love as if it were a thing in itself, and not 
 only an intellectual substance. The which, thing in 
 truth is false, for love exists not in itself as a substance, 
 but is an accident in substance. . . . 
 
 A greater license of speech is granted to poets than 
 to writers of prose, and as these writers in rhyme are 
 no other than poets using the vulgar tongue, it is 
 fitting and reasonable that greater license should be 
 permitted to them than to the other writers in the 
 vulgar tongue. That the poets have thus spoken (as 
 has been said) appears from Virgil, who says that 
 Juno — that is, a goddess hostile to the Trojans — spoke 
 to iEolus, lord of the winds. In this same poet the 
 inanimate thing speaks to the animate thing . In 
 Lucan the animate thing speaks to the inanimate 
 thing. In Homer, a man speaks to his own knowl- 
 edge as to another person. In Ovid, Love speaks as if 
 he were a human person. ... It would be a great dis- 
 grace to him who should rhyme anything under the 
 
I UNIVERSITY J 
 
 '^BELOVED FLORENCE." 53 
 
 garb of a figure or of rhetorical coloring, if, afterward 
 being asked, he should not be able to denude his words 
 of this garb in such wise that they would have a true 
 meaning, and my first friend and I are well acquainted 
 with those who rhyme thus foolishly. 
 
 This reference to Cavalcanti,that shows the sympathy 
 existing between him and Dante, is an illustration of 
 the new literature and the poverty of intellectual cul- 
 ture at the time when the Vita Nuova was written. . . . 
 It indicates, also, something of the range of Dante's 
 reading; Virgil was already his Master and poet, and 
 the four other poets to whom he refers appear again in 
 company in the Divina Commedia {Inferno, canto 
 iv., Longfellow's translation): — 
 
 Four mighty shades I saw approaching us ; 
 
 Semblance had they, nor sorrowful, nor glad. 
 To say to me, began my gracious Master: 
 
 " Him with that falchion in his hand behold, 
 
 Who comes before the three, even as their lord. 
 That one is Homer, poet sovereign ! 
 
 He who comes next is Horace, the Satirist ; 
 
 The third is Ovid ; the last is Lucan." . . . 
 
 The fair school 
 Of that lord of the song pre-eminent, 
 Who o'er the others like an eagle soars. 
 
 When they together had discoursed somewhat, 
 They turned to me with signs of salutation, 
 And on beholding this, my Master smiled ; 
 
 And more of honor still, much more, they did me, 
 In that they made me one of their own band ; 
 So that the sixth was I, 'mid' so much wit. 
 
 "The contrast between such powerful imaginative 
 poetry as the magnificent and living scene of which 
 
54 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 these verses form a part and a passage, like the literal 
 statement in the Vita Nuova concerning poetic usage 
 and diction, affords a measure of the growth of 
 Dante's knowledge and imagination from boyhood to 
 manhood. . . . 
 
 He was not only poet, as the passage shows, but 
 critic also, and indeed this passage is the first essa y 
 of modern criticism. The direct literary impulse 
 which Dante gave was to become unparalleled." 
 
 We judge that Dante foresaw his own fame from 
 the prophecy that he puts into the mouth of Bru- 
 netto Latini: — 
 
 " If thou," he answered, " follow but thy star, 
 Thou canst not miss at last a glorious haven." 
 
 Inferno, canto xv. 
 
 Sonnet (Rossetti's Tramlation) . 
 
 Love hath so long possessed me for his own, 
 
 And made his lordship so familiar, 
 That he who at first irked me is now grown 
 
 Unto my heart as its best secrets are. 
 
 And thus when he in such sore wdse doth mar 
 My life, that all its strength seems gone from it, 
 Mine inmost being then feels thoroughly quit 
 
 Of anguish, and all evil keeps afar. 
 
 I was still occupied with this poem when the Lord 
 God of justice called my most gracious lady unto 
 himself, that she might be glorious under the banner 
 of that blessed Queen Mary, whose name had always 
 a deep reverence in the words of holy Beatrice. 
 
 Dante's grief at the death of Beatrice was exces- 
 
"BELOVED FLORENCE." 55 
 
 sive. He addressed the magistrates of the city, asking 
 their sympathy in Latin of dolorous strains. 
 
 J. A. Symonds says: We may reflect, not without 
 humor, upon the grave citizens of Florence receiv- 
 ing in conclave this eloquent epistle of the forlorn 
 poet. Was their sunshine clouded? Were there no 
 ballot-boxes and votes of banishment, no cakes and 
 ale and civic banquets, left, because, forsooth, this 
 youngest of the angels had been taken? . . . The 
 death of Beatrice seemed at first to snap the thread of 
 Dante's life. She had become a need of his soul since 
 the age of nine years. She was the thought that gave 
 to his soul its unity, the ceaseless rhythm of its song. 
 
 Dante writes, in the Convito, book iii., chapter 13: — 
 After some time my mind, which strove to regain 
 strength, bethought itself of having recourse to the 
 method which had helped to comfort other spirits in 
 distress. I took to reading the book, not known to 
 many students, of Boethius, wherewith, unhappy and 
 in exile, he had comforted himself. And hearing 
 also that Tully had written another book, in which, 
 while treating of friendship, he had used words of 
 consolation to Lselius on the death of his friend 
 Scipio, I read that also. 
 
 And as it happens that a man goes seeking silver, 
 and, far from his designs, finds gold, which hidden 
 causes yield him, not perchance without God's guid- 
 ance, so I, who sought for consolation, found not 
 only comfort for my tears, but also words of authors 
 and of sciences and of books, weighing the which, I 
 
56 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 judged well that philosophy, the lady of these authors, 
 these sciences, these books, was a thing supreme. 
 
 I began to go where she displayed her very self, - 
 that is, in the schools of the religions and the disputa- 
 tions of the philosophers, — so that in a short time, 
 about thirty months, I began so much to feel her 
 sweetness, that her love chased away and destroyed 
 all other thought in me. 
 
 After these words, we can comprehend Dante's transi- 
 tion from the worship of Beatrice as a living woman to 
 a worship of her as a symbol of Theology, exalted to 
 the Highest Heavens, near the Great White Throne, 
 where, among angels and archangels (he himself 
 cleansed and becoming purified), he beheld her enter- 
 ing into the perfect Hght of the ray eternal." 
 
 One day, Dante tells us, while he was drawing the 
 resemblance of an angel (of course no other than his 
 Beatrice), he suddenly became conscious that some 
 persons were standing near him. As he rose to address 
 them, his simple words of apology came from his 
 lonely heart, ^^ Another was with mg." 
 
 Robert Browning. "One Word More." 
 
 Dante once prepared to paint an angel, 
 
 '* Whom to please?" you whisper, '' Beatrice ! " 
 
 Dante, who loved well because he hated, 
 Hated wickedness that hinders loving, 
 Dante standing, studying his angel, 
 In there broke the folk of his Inferno ; 
 
57 
 
 Says he, "Certain people of importance" 
 (Such he gave his daily, dreadful line to) 
 Entered, and would seize, forsooth, the poet. 
 Says the poet, "Then I stopped my painting.' 
 
 You and I would rather see that angel 
 Painted by the tenderness of Dante, 
 Would we not? than read a fresh Inferno. 
 
 You and I will never see that picture. 
 While he mused on love and Beatrice, 
 While he softened o'er his outlined angel, 
 In they broke, those *' people of importance ! " 
 We and Bice bear the loss forever. 
 
 It is said that Cimabue taught Dante in drawing 
 and Casella taught him in music. 
 
 Soon after the painting of the angel, still dejected, 
 gloomy, a young and beautiful lady sat in a window 
 where she gazed upon him so pitifully that he became 
 grateful to her, and after several such scenes on divers 
 occasions, he found a pleasure in her gentle eyes. 
 At the same time he reproached himself because of 
 his pleasure. 
 
 Rossetti thinks that the lady became his wife. 
 
 Dante closes the Vita Nuova, saying: — 
 "It was given to me to behold a very wonderful 
 vision, wherein I saw things which determined me 
 that I would say nothing further of this most blessed 
 one until such time as I could discourse more worthily 
 concerning her. 
 
 "And to this end I labor all I can, as she well know- 
 
58 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 eth. Wherefore, if it be His pleasure, through whom 
 is the Ufe of all things, that my life continue with 
 me a few years, it is my hope that I shall yet write 
 concerning her what hath not before been written of 
 any woman. After the which may it seem good unto 
 Him who is the Master of grace, that my spirit should 
 go hence to behold the glory of its lady, to wit, of 
 that blessed Beatrice, who now gazeth continually 
 on His countenance, who is blessed throughout all 
 ages." 
 
 This extraordinary wish received its high consum- 
 mation when the ardent lover, poet, and seer had 
 written the last line of the trinity of the Divina 
 Commedia, " The love which moves the sun and all the 
 stars.^^ 
 
 " Of a surety," he says, " I have now set my feet on 
 that point of life beyond the which he must not pass 
 who would return." 
 
 Never in Dante's writings does he speak of Beatrice 
 as a bride (except of Heaven!). Where he speaks of 
 a visit from "one who had been united by the near- 
 est kindred to that most gracious creature," C. E. 
 Norton thinks the reference was to the brother of 
 Beatrice. Nor does Beatrice allude to it in those 
 touching interviews of the other world. This marriage 
 did not form a part of Dante's philosophical theory! 
 It is only from a clause in the will left by Beatrice's 
 father that the learned commentators know of her 
 marriage at all. 
 
 True to his love, he sought no wedded bliss for him- 
 self until after the death of Beatrice at the early 
 age of twenty-four; and then, only at the earnest 
 
" BELOVED FLORENCE." 69 
 
 persuasions of his family relatives, he married Gemma 
 Donati, a lady of fine appearance and distinguished 
 family. 
 
 Boccaccio thinks that they did not live happily 
 together, because the wife did not join her husband 
 in his exile. How could she, with her seven chil- 
 dren? Dante could not support them, as his entire 
 estate had been confiscated. Literally a wanderer, 
 he trod the wine-press alone! Such solitary destiny 
 was decreed, and we have for all time (and eternity 
 too) our Dante and the Divina Commedia. 
 
60 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 PART III. 
 
 THE DIVINA COMMEDIA. 
 
 H. W. Longfellow. 
 
 How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers! 
 This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves 
 Birds build their nests ; w^hile canopied with leaves, 
 Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers. 
 
 And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers ! . . . 
 
 Ah ! from what agonies of heart and brain, 
 What exultations trampling on despair, 
 What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong, 
 
 What passionate outcry of a soul in pain. 
 Uprose this poem of the earth and air, 
 This mediaeval miracle of song ! 
 
" BELOVED FLORENCE." 61 
 
 The Divina Commedia (quoting from James Rus- 
 sell Lowell) is in three parts, each part in thirty- 
 three cantos, in allusion to the thirty-three years of 
 our Saviour's life. The poem considers, in its three 
 divisions, the threefold state of man, — sin, grace, and 
 beatitude. It is written in triple rhyme, emblematic 
 of the Trinity. 
 
 The model of the poem is the Christian Basilica 
 — the ethnic fore-court of those who know not God; 
 the purgatorial middle space of repentance, confes- 
 sion, and absolution; the altar of reconciliation, beyond 
 and over which hangs the emblem of the Mediator, 
 of the divine made human, that the human might 
 learn to become divine. Here are general rules in 
 which every Christian may find comfort. 
 
 But the poem comes nearer to us than this. It is 
 the real history of a brother man, tempted, purified, 
 and, at last, a triumphant soul. ... It teaches the 
 benign ministry of sorrow. ... It is also an apothe- 
 osis of woman. 
 
 J. A. Symonds. 
 The Divina Commedia lies before us! Let us un- 
 cover our heads, therefore, and say in the great words 
 of Ennius: — 
 
 Hail Poet ! who for mortal man dost pour 
 
 Strong wine of words that burn and sense that soars, 
 
 Drawn from thy bleeding bosom's fiery core, 
 And tempered with the bitter fount of tears ! 
 
 This is the proper salutation for the man who fed 
 his poem with the life-blood and the marrow of his 
 soul through years which made him gray and gaunt. 
 
62 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 From Hargreave's *' Literary Workers." 
 
 There comes a man of sorrowful countenance, with 
 a hreast furrowed by a thousand woes, and in him 
 you see one of the most extraordinary explorers 
 of the territories of the Imagination the world has 
 ever produced. He tells how he passed the dolorous 
 gates through which hope could never force her way, 
 was ferried over the fiery lake, trod the nine circles of 
 the Inferno, shrank aghast from their terrific spec- 
 tacles, or quailed under their tempestuous cries, and 
 then informs us how the unwearied Muse, emerging 
 from this realm of horrors, toiled through the tedious 
 zones of Purgatorio, pursuing hef way into the happier 
 spheres of Paradiso; ... all the incidents of this 
 fearful journey being detailed with as much graphic 
 minuteness as if he had been traveling on the most 
 solid soil. 
 
 THE INFERNO. 
 H. W. Longfellow. 
 I enter, and I see thee in the gloom 
 Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine ! 
 And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine. 
 The air is filled with some unknown perfume ; 
 The congregation of the dead make room 
 For thee to pass ; the votive tapers shine ; 
 Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's groves of pine, 
 The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb. 
 From the confessionals I hear arise 
 Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies, 
 And lamentations from the crypts below ; 
 And then a voice celestial, that begins 
 With the pathetic words, "Although your sins 
 As scarlet be," and ends with '* as the snow." 
 
63 
 
 THE INFERNO. 
 
 This first book of the Divina Commedia opens upon 
 the evening of Good Friday, 1300 A.D. 
 
 The poet describes himself as midway in life (he 
 was thirty-five), entering a dark forest and encounter- 
 ing fearful dangers from a leopard, afterwards a lion, 
 next a wolf. His courage almost gone, he was rushing 
 "downward to the lowlands" for safety, when he was 
 met by Virgil, who had been deputed by Beatrice to 
 meet and conduct him through the perils of the lower 
 world and lead him upward, purified, sanctified, and 
 ready for her companionship in Paradise. 
 
 Dante had been a devoted student of Virgil, so was 
 overjoyed when the great spirit-poet made himself 
 known, and thus he addressed him: — 
 
 ''And art thou, then, that Virgil, that well-spring 
 From which such copious floods of eloquence 
 Have issued?" I with front abashed replied, 
 "Glory and light of all the tuneful train ! 
 May it avail me, that I long with zeal 
 Have sought thy volume, and with love immense 
 Have conned it o'er ! My master, thou, and guide ! 
 Thou he from whom alone I have derived 
 That style which for its beauty into fame 
 
 Gary's Translation. 
 
 The admiration for Virgil was universal in Dante's 
 time. At Milan one can see in the Ambrosian Library 
 the well-worn copy of Virgil that belonged to Petrarch. 
 On the blank leaves he had written the name and 
 praises of his Laura, "that they might oftenest meet 
 his eye," he said. Why could not kind fate have 
 
64 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 spared to us Dante's Virgil, with one sonnet to his 
 Beatrice traced by his own hand? 
 
 Leigh Hunt thus describes geologically the situation 
 of the Inferno: "It descends from beneath Jerusalem 
 to the center of the earth, and is a funnel, graduated 
 in circles, each circle being a separate place of torment 
 for a different vice, the point of the funnel terminating 
 with Satan stuck into ice." The allegorical ItaHan 
 Illustrators followed this idea to the full in their 
 pyramidal representations of Dante's poem. 
 
 Milman says, in his History of Christiantty, " Dante is 
 the one authorized topographer of the mediaeval Hell." 
 
 Ruskin writes of it in Modern Painters: ''Milton's 
 effort in all that he tells us of his Inferno is to make 
 it indefinite; Dante's, to make it definite. Both, in- 
 deed, describe it as entered through gates; but, within 
 the gate, all is wild and fenceless, with Milton. . . . 
 Dante's Inferno is accurately separated into circles 
 drawn with well-pointed compasses, mapped, and prop- 
 erly surveyed in every direction, trenched in a thor- 
 oughly good style of engineering from depth to depth." 
 
 The story of Francesca da Rimini, in canto v., is 
 better known, perhaps, than any other of the Inferno. 
 
 As Dante saw the two lovers approaching them, 
 "so light before the wind," he asked permission of 
 Virgil to address them, which being granted, he en- 
 treated them and they came, — 
 
 "As doves, 
 By fond desire invited, on wide wings 
 And firm, to their sweet nests returning home 
 Cleave the air, wafted by their will along," 
 
 they approached and told their sad tale. 
 
" BELOVED FLORENCE." 65 
 
 " No greater grief than to remember days 
 Of joy when mis'ry is at hand ! That kens 
 The learn'd instructor." 
 
 Perhaps, since Dante, no writer has touched the 
 tragedy of Paolo and Francesca so exquisitely and 
 powerfully as Stephen Phillips in his dramatic poem, 
 A Tragedy. 
 
 In act iv.: — 
 
 Francesca. And yet I fear to see thy air so glad — 
 
 Paolo. What do you fear? 
 Francesca. One watches quietly. 
 Paolo. Who? 
 
 Francesca. I know not ; perhaps the quiet face 
 Of God : the eternal Listener is near. 
 
 Paolo's passionate appeal beginning — 
 "What can we fear, we two? " 
 
 is strikingly similar in sentiment, intensity, reckless 
 fervor, and even the form of expression, to Lowell's 
 sonnet. 
 
 Us, then whose only pain can be to part, 
 
 How wilt thou punish? For what ecstasy 
 
 Together to be blown about the globe 
 
 What rapture. . . . ^^^^^^^ Phillips. 
 
 Us, undivided when man's vengeance came, 
 God's, half-forgives that doth not here divide, 
 And were this bitter whirl-blast fanged with flame, 
 To me, 't were summer, being side by side. 
 
 From James Russell LoioelVs Sonnet to Paolo and Francesca. 
 
66 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 From Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero- Worship." 
 
 Francesca and her lover! What quahties in that! 
 A thing woven as out of rainbows on a ground of 
 eternal black. A small flute voice of infinite wail 
 speaks there into our very heart of hearts — a touch 
 of womanhood in it, too — and how, even in the pit of 
 woe, it is a solace that he will never part from her. . . . 
 And the racking winds whirl them away again to wail 
 forever. Strange to think, Dante was the friend of 
 this poor Francesca's father; Francesca herself may 
 have sat upon the poet's knee as a bright, innocent 
 child. Infinite pity, yet also infinite rigor of law! It 
 is so nature is made; it is so Dante discerned it. 
 
 FRANCESCA DA RIMINI. 
 
 T. W. Parsons. 
 You restless ghosts that roam the lurid air, 
 I feel your misery, for I was there ; 
 Yea, not in dreams, but breathing and alive ; 
 Have seen the storm and heard the tempest drive, 
 Yet while the sleet went withering as it past, 
 And the mad hail gave scourges to the blast, 
 While all was black below and flame above. 
 Have thought — 't is little to the storm of Love I 
 You know that sadly, know it to your cost, 
 Ah I Too much loving, and forever lost. 
 
67 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN (Modern Painters). 
 
 When Dante describes the spirits falling from the 
 bank of Acheron (canto iii.) as dead leaves flutter from 
 a bough, he gives the most perfect image possible of 
 their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness, and scat- 
 tering agony of despair, without, however, for an in- 
 stant losing his own clear perception that these are 
 souls and those are leaves; he makes no confusion of 
 one with the other. . . . 
 
 Dante, in his most intense moods, has entire com- 
 mand of himself, and can look around calmly at all 
 moments for the image or the word that will best tell 
 what he sees to the upper world. 
 
 Indeed, Dante said that no word had ever made 
 him say what he did not choose to say. 
 
 Ruskin says of the word "enamel," in canto iv.: " It 
 is the first instance I know of its right use. Dante 
 did not use this phrase as we use it. Dante means, in 
 using this metaphor of the grass of the Inferno, to 
 mark that it is laid as a tempering and cooling sub- 
 stance over the dark, metallic, gloomy ground, but yet 
 so hardened by the fire that it is not any more fresh 
 or living grass, but a smooth, silent, lifeless bed of 
 eternal green. . . . The same word was used by the 
 Gorgons when they caught sight of Dante, and would 
 have turned him into enamel — stone was not hard 
 enough, stone might crumble away, or something with 
 life might grow upon it. . . ." 
 
 Ruskin's chapters entitled "The Rocks" and "The 
 Forests " are delightful reading for the study of Dante. 
 
68 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 In the twenty-first canto, Dante compares one of the 
 deep fissures in the Inferno's depths to the arsenal of 
 the Venetians, where 
 
 " Boils in the winter the tenacious pitch, 
 To smear their unsound vessels o'er again." 
 
 Of this arsenal Mr. Hillard says, in his Six Months in 
 Italy: " No reader of Dante will fail to pay a visit to the 
 arsenal,^ from which, in order to illustrate the terrors 
 of his Inferno, the great poet drew one of those striking 
 and picturesque images, characteristic alike of the 
 boldness and the power of his genius, which never 
 hesitated to look for its materials among the homely 
 details and familiar incidents of life. In his hands 
 the boiling of pitch and the calking of seams ascend 
 to the dignity of poetry." 
 
 Into this boiling pitch Dante consigned the "Bar- 
 rators," or those in public office who made use of their 
 position to sell and make money out of the patronage 
 in their power. 
 
 Inferno, Canto XXXI. 58-60 (Longfellow's Translation). 
 
 The giant Nimrod is described : — 
 
 " His face appeared to me as long and large 
 As is at Rome the pine-cone of Saint Peter's ; 
 And in proportion were the other bones." 
 
 Professor Norton says: " This pine-cone of bronze was 
 set originally upon the summit of the mausoleum of 
 Hadrian. After this imperial sepulchre had under- 
 
 *The arsenal of Venice is not now in the glory of Dante's 
 day, nor can visitors to the arsenal see *' the boiling pitch." 
 
" BELOVED FLORENCE." 69 
 
 gone many evil fates, and as its ornaments were 
 stripped one by one from it, the cone was in the 
 sixth century taken down and carried off to adorn a 
 fountain, which had been constructed for the use of 
 dusty and thirsty pilgrims in a pillared inclosure, 
 called the Paradiso, in front of the old Basilica of 
 Saint Peter's. Here it remained for centuries, and 
 when the old church gave way to the new, it was put 
 where it now stands, useless and out of place, in the 
 trim and formal gardens of the Papal palace. It 
 serves the bronze-workers of Rome as a model for an 
 inkstand, and is sold to travelers, few of whom know 
 the history and the poetry belonging to its original.^ 
 
 Inferno, Canto XXXIII. 80-85. 
 
 The terrible tragedy of the death, by famine, of Count 
 Ugolino and his innocent grandsons is told by Dante 
 in burning language, and draws forth a scathing re- 
 buke. 
 
 Ah ! Pisa, thou opprobrium of the people 
 
 Of the fair land there where the si doth sound, 
 Since slow to punish thee thy neighbors are, 
 
 Let the Capraia and Gorgona move. 
 And make a hedge across the mouth of Arno, 
 
 That every person in thee it may drown ! 
 For if Count Ugolino had the fame 
 
 Of having in thy castles thee betrayed. 
 Thou should' st not on such cross have put his sons. 
 
 Longfelloiv' 8 Translation. 
 
 ^ We found the pine-cone as Professor Norton describes it. 
 Thanks to him, for no one of whom we inquired, nor even the 
 guide, had ever heard of the pine-cone. 
 
70 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 THE TOWER OF FAMINE. 
 
 Chaucer, in the "Monk's Tale." 
 Of this tragedie it ought enough suffice, 
 Whoso will here it in a longer wise 
 Redeth the great poete of Itaillie, 
 That brighte Dante, for he can it devise 
 Fro' point to point, not a word Tsill he faille. 
 
 Percy Bysshe Shelley. 
 Amid the desolation of a city 
 Which was the cradle and is now the grave 
 Of an extinguished people, so that pity 
 Weeps o'er the shipwrecks of oblivion's wave, 
 There stands the Tower of Famine. 
 
 There are indeed "men whose souls are like the sea." 
 
 Victor Hugo's "William Shakespeare." 
 Those billows that ebb and flood, that inexorable 
 going and coming, that noise of all the winds, that 
 blackness and that translucency, that vegetation pecu- 
 liar to the deep, that democracy of clouds in full hurri- 
 cane, those eagles flecked with foam, those wonderful 
 star-risings reflected in mysterious agitations by mil- 
 lions of luminous wave-tops, confused heads of the 
 multitudinous sea; the errant lightnings which seemed 
 to watch those prodigious sobbings, those half-seen 
 monsters, those nights of darkness broken by howUngs, 
 those furies, those frenzies, those torments, those rocks, 
 those shipwrecks, those fleets crushing each other, 
 mingling their human thunders with the divine 
 thunders, and staining the sea with blood ; — then that 
 charm, that mildness, those festivals, those gay white 
 
" BELOVED FLORENCE." 71 
 
 sails, those fishing-boats, those songs amid the uproar, 
 those shining ports, those mists rising from the shore, 
 those cities at the horizon's edge, that deep blue of sky 
 and water, that useful asperity, that bitter savor which 
 keeps the world wholesome, that harsh salt without 
 which all would putrefy; those wraths and those ap- 
 peasements — that all in one, the unforeseen amid the 
 changeless, the vast marvel of inexhaustibly varied 
 monotony, that smoothness after an upheaval, those 
 hells and those heavens of the unfathomed, infinite, 
 ever-moving deep — all this may exist in a mind — 
 and then that mind is called genius — and you have 
 ^schylus, you have Isaiah, you have Juvenal, you 
 have Dante, you have Michael Angelo, you have 
 Shakespeare; and it is all one, whether you look at 
 these souls or at the Sea! 
 
 From "Balder." (Sydney Dobell.) 
 
 Doctor. Ah! thou too 
 
 Sad Alighieri, like a waning moon, 
 Setting in storm behind a grove of bays I 
 
 Balder. Yes, the great Florentine who wove his web 
 And thrust it into hell, and drew it forth 
 Immortal, having burned all that could burn, 
 And leaving only what shall still be found 
 Untouched, nor with the smell of fire upon it, 
 Under the final ashes of this world. 
 
 Maria Francesca Rossetti, in her Shadow of Dante: 
 " Some there are who, gazing upon Dante's Hell, mainly 
 with their own eyes, are startled by the grotesque ele- 
 ment throughout the Cantica as a whole, and shocked 
 
72 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 at the ludicrous tone of not a few of its parts. Others 
 seek rather to gaze on Dante's Hell with Dante's eyes; 
 these discern in that grotesqueness a realized horror, 
 in that ludicrousness a sovereign contempt of evil. . , . 
 Dante's Lucifer does appear 'less than an archangel 
 ruined,' immeasurably less; for he appears a seraph 
 willfully fallen. No illusive splendor is here to dazzle 
 eye and mind into sympathy with rebellious pride; no 
 vagueness to shroud in mist things fearful or things 
 abominable. Dante's devils are hateful and hated; 
 Dante's reprobates, loathsome and loathed, despicable 
 and despised, or, at best, miserable and commiserated. 
 Dante is guiltless of seducing any soul of man tow- 
 ards making or calling Evil his God." 
 
 Dante said that he found the original of his hell in 
 the world that he inhabited, and yet the '' Sources of 
 the Inferno " is a theme much discussed by savants to 
 this day. Bottari, the literary antiquary, unearthed 
 The Vision of Alberico, and behold! Dante had stolen 
 it. It was a dull, heavy thing, written by a monk, 
 in Latin. 
 
 One critic goes back to Dante's scholarly instructor, 
 Ser Brunetto Latini, and considers his Tesoretto the 
 model for the Divine Comedy. " If any one can 
 imagine this," writes Zannoni, who edited the work, 
 " he must confess that a slight and almost invisible 
 spark served to kindle a vast conflagration." 
 
 Visions are as old as the world, and will continue 
 while time endures. Dante is a genius, and original, 
 or he is nothing. Every part of his poem corresponds 
 to an epoch of his life. The Inferno came into the 
 
" BELOVED FLORENCE/' 73 
 
 first gloomy years of exile. His stay in Paris followed, 
 and lends its brighter tone to the Purgatorio. Peace 
 came in "The Paradiso," — with hope of a life beyond. 
 
 Dante's journey thus far has occupied two days and 
 nights. He has now come to the early dawn of Easter 
 Sunday. 
 
 The Guide and I unto that hidden road 
 
 Now entered to return to the bright world, 
 And without care of having any rest, 
 
 We mounted up, he first and I the second. 
 Till I beheld through a round aperture 
 
 Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear ; 
 Thence we came forth to re-behold the stars. 
 
 Longfellow's Translation. 
 
74 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 PART IV. 
 THE PURGATORIO. 
 
 SCHELLING. 
 
 " The Purgatorio must be recognized as the pictu- 
 resque part of the poem. Not only are the penances 
 here imposed upon sinners pictorially treated even to 
 brightness of coloring, but the journey up the holy 
 mountain of Purgatory presents in detail a rapid suc- 
 cession of shifting landscapes, scenes, and manifold 
 play of light, until upon its outermost boundary, 
 when the poet has reached the waters of Lethe, the 
 highest pomp of painting and color displays itself." 
 
 Not unwillingly do we leave the Inferno's doleful 
 regions to ascend, with the Itahan pilgrims, to the 
 " milder shades of Purgatory." 
 
 Purgatory is represented as a mountain rising out 
 of the Southern Ocean, exactly opposite Mount Zion, in 
 Jerusalem. It is divided into seven terraces, in which 
 are detained those whom Dante selected as needing 
 punishment for seven deadly sins: Pride, Avarice, 
 Envy, Anger, Sloth, Lust, Gluttony. 
 
 It is a toilsome place enough, but it comes bearing 
 the torch of Hope after a long night of despair. Leigh 
 Hunt says, " Even in a theological point of view they 
 are something like a bit of Christian refreshment after 
 the horrors of the Inferno." 
 
 Dante says (canto i., Gary's translation): — 
 
75 
 
 Well pleased to leave so cruel sea behind ; 
 And of that second region will I sing, 
 In which the human spirit from sinful blot 
 Is purged, and for ascent to Heaven prepares. 
 
 To the right hand I turn'd, and fix'd my mind 
 On the other pole attentive, where I saw 
 Four stars ne'er seen before save by the ken 
 Of our first parents. Heaven of their rays 
 Seem'd joyous. O thou northern site ! bereft 
 Indeed and widow'd, since of these deprived." 
 
 Was Dante inspired to see the Southern Cross, not 
 named until after his time? 
 
 Turning a little to the other pole, 
 
 There where the Wain had disappeared already, 
 
 I saw a venerable old man — it was Cato ; 
 
 Low down his beard, and mixed with hoary white 
 
 Descended, like his locks, 'which parting, fell 
 
 Upon his breast in double fold." 
 
 The beams of the bright stars fell upon his face. 
 Dante bent his knee in reverence as Cato addressed 
 them: — 
 
 " Say who are ye, that stemming the blind stream, 
 Forth from the eternal prison-house have fled?" 
 
 Virgil replied in most eloquent speech, begging Cato 
 for the love of Marcia to permit them to pass through 
 his seven-fold realm. Upon which Cato moved those 
 "venerable plumes" (his beard), and with a gentle 
 rebuke to Virgil (" no flattery is needful") for his over- 
 much praise, he proceeded to give him instructions 
 how to prepare Dante for the trying ordeal: — 
 
76 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 "... With a slender reed 
 See that thou duly gird him, and his face 
 Lave, till all sordid stain thou wipe from thence. 
 For not with eye by any cloud obscur'd, 
 Would it be seemly before him to come, 
 Who stands the foremost minister in Heaven." 
 
 When we had come, where yet the tender dew 
 
 Shone with the sun, and in a place where fresh 
 
 The wind breathed o'er it, while it slowly dried ; 
 
 Both hands extended on the watery grass, 
 
 My master placed, in graceful act and kind. 
 
 Whence I, of his intent before apprized. 
 
 Stretch 'd out to him my cheeks suffused with tears — 
 
 There to my visage he anew restored 
 
 That hue which the dun shades of hell concealed. 
 
 Then Virgil • girded Dante with a reed, plucking 
 many before the right one was found. 
 
 Whether one was plucked, another there 
 Resembling, straightway in its place arose. 
 
 We think of the baptism of Christ; of the reed 
 placed in His right hand when led away to His cruci- 
 fixion; of the reed shaken by the wind. 
 
 Lingering by the trembling waters, the pilgrims saw 
 God's angel. 
 
 He drove ashore in a small bark so swift 
 And light, that in its course no wave it drank. 
 
 With the angel came a multitude of souls, who gazed 
 with wondering astonishment at the strange new- 
 comers. Among them was Casella, who, — 
 
 . . . Darting before the rest 
 With such fond ardor to embrace me, I 
 To do the like was moved. O shadows vain 
 
ROSSETTI'S DANTE. 
 
ABOUT DANTE AND HIS " BELOVED FLORENCE." 79 
 
 Except in outward semblance ! thrice my hands 
 I clasp'd behind it, they as oft returned 
 Empty into my breast again. 
 
 But Casella could sing, and was still enchanting 
 his listeners on the shore of those " trembling waters," 
 when Cato warned them to begone to the mountain. 
 
 How real it all seems ! 
 
 The simile of the sheep, in canto iii., is pronounced 
 by Macaulay to be the most perfect of its kind in the 
 world, — the most imaginative, the most picturesque, 
 and the most sweetly expressed. 
 
 The simile is drawn from the movement of a crowd 
 of spirits on the crags of the steep bank, who were 
 startled at the sight of Dante's shadow lying along 
 the ground — for spirits cast no shadows. 
 
 Virgil's interview with Sordello, in canto vi., is most 
 interesting (Longfellow's translation): — 
 
 . . . O Lombard soul ! 
 How lofty and disdainful thou did'st bear thee, 
 And grand and slow in moving of thine eyes. 
 
 "... Mantuan, I am Sordello 
 
 Of thine own land," and one embraced the other. 
 
 Gary says that Sordello's life is wrapped in obscurity. 
 A writer of Provengal poetry, he was prominent as a 
 Ghibelline, and was a knight who aspired to deeds of 
 valor. 
 
 Sordello. (Robert Browning.) 
 For he, for he, 
 Gate-vein of this hearts' blood of Lombardy, 
 (If I should falter now !) for he is thine ! 
 Sordello, thy forerunner, Florentine ! 
 
80 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 The opening of the eighth canto is very beautiful: — 
 
 Now was the time that wakens fond desire 
 In men at sea, and melts their thoughtful heart 
 Who in the morn have bid sweet friends farewell ! 
 And pilgrim newly on his road with love 
 Thrills, if he hear the vesper bell from far 
 That seems to mourn for the expiring day." 
 
 Macaulay says: " Dante's temper and his situation 
 had led him to fix his observation almost exclusively 
 on human nature. 
 
 " To other writers evening may be the season of dews 
 and stars and radiant clouds; to him it is the hour 
 of fond recollection and of passionate devotion, the 
 hour which melts the heart." 
 
 In canto xxi. is a suggestion for an explanation of 
 the meaning of the temblors that so frequently visit 
 some parts of our fair earth, that (to our knowledge) 
 has never been quoted by scientists of modern times, 
 whose puzzled brains are sending out all imaginable 
 and unimaginable solutions of the mysterious sources 
 of these grewsome visitants, but the poet's exquisite 
 conception is too lofty to be of the earth, earthy. 
 
 Dante says of the trembling of the mountain: — 
 
 " It trembles here whenever any soul 
 Feels itself pure, so that it soars or moves 
 To mount aloft." 
 
 Canon Farrar says: " Sometimes in a single line 
 Dante infuses a moral lesson which is a moral given 
 for life. One lesson that he teaches is, that the for- 
 giveness of sin is one thing and the remission of sin 
 another. The spirits in Purgatory do not feel worthy 
 
O- T'rlc 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF . 
 
 81 
 
 to see God until the angels have brushed from their fore- 
 heads the seven letters which stand for the seven sins. 
 
 " That punishment is the easiest to bear which fol- 
 lows soonest on the sin. . . . 
 
 " It is solely by realizing such truths that any one 
 of us can attain the ideal which Dante wanted to pic- 
 ture forth before us and help us to attain; the ideal of 
 one who in boyhood is gentle and obedient and modest, 
 in youth is temperate, resolute, and loyal, in ripe years 
 is prudent, just, and generous, and who in age has at- 
 tained to calm wisdom and to perfect peace in God." 
 
 While the Purgatorio falls below the Inferno in 
 intense over-excitement, its interest increases step by 
 step, and one cannot resist its chastening, subduing 
 influence. Many passages from the Scriptures are in- 
 troduced, with frequent allusions to the sayings of 
 Christ, whose name is not mentioned in the Inferno. 
 
 It is curious, the juxtaposition of Biblical with 
 mythological characters. 
 
 The pilgrims are advancing up the mountain of 
 Purgatory when they descry a portal with three steps 
 beneath (canto ix., Gary's translation). 
 
 And one who watched, but spake not yet a word. 
 
 When Virgil had explained their coming, this Being 
 graciously bade them approach. 
 
 *' The lowest stair was marble white. . . . 
 
 . . . The next of hue more dark 
 
 Than sablest grain . . . 
 
 . . . The third, that lay 
 
 Massy above, seem'd porphyry, that flam'd 
 
 Red as the life-blood spouting from a vein." 
 
82 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 J, A. Symonds says: "In this grand passage, the 
 white and polished marble is purity and sincerity 
 (symbolism of the most striking kind) of soul, per- 
 fect candor, without which penitence is vain. The 
 dark slab, dry and rugged, represents a broken and 
 contrite heart; its rift is crosswise, indicating the 
 length, and breadth, and depth of sorrow for past sin. 
 The sanguine-colored porphyry is love — red as heart's 
 blood, and solid for the soul to stay thereon. The 
 threshold signifies the true foundation of the church. 
 Here God's angel sits." 
 
 The pilgrims were admitted, and within they heard, — 
 
 " We praise Thee, O God ! 
 In accents blended with sweet melody." 
 
 Then on, from terrace to terrace, they mounted, 
 Dante with "ever new thirst goading him on," till re- 
 warded by the sight of Beatrice ! 
 
 Virgil had fulfilled his mission, and had led Dante 
 up step by step, till now he was to see the fair Beatrice. 
 (Canto XXX., Gary's translation.) 
 
BEATEICE. 
 
ABOUT DANTE AND HIS "BELOVED FLORENCE." 85 
 
 ... In white veil with olive wreathed, 
 
 A virgin in my view appeared, beneath 
 
 Green mantle, robed in hue of living flame : 
 
 And o'er my spirit, that in former days 
 
 Within her presence had abode so long. 
 
 No shuddering terror crept. Mine eyes no more 
 
 Had knowledge of her ; yet there moved from her 
 
 A hidden virtue, at whose touch awak'd. 
 
 The power of ancient love was strong within me. 
 
 No sooner on my vision streaming, smote 
 The heavenly influence, which, years past, and e'en 
 In childhood, thrill'd me, than towards Virgil I 
 Turned me to leftward ; panting, like a babe, 
 That flees for refuge to his mother's breast. . . . 
 But Virgil had bereft us of himself ! 
 Virgil, my best-lov'd father ; Virgil, he 
 To whom I gave me up for safety. 
 
86 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 Could any words express sorrow more deeply? 
 Beatrice's words were not consoling: — 
 
 " Dante ! weep not that Virgil leaves thee ; nay, 
 Weep thou not yet : behooves thee feel the edge 
 Of other sword ; and thou shall weep for that." 
 
 Dante turned at the sound, and their eyes met. 
 ** Observe me well. I am, in sooth, I am 
 Beatrice." 
 
 She looked upon him sternly, and he blushed with 
 mingled mortification and self-reproach. Then the 
 angels about the chariot began to sing, — 
 
 ** In thee, O gracious Lord ! my hope hath been." 
 
 Now was Dante's soul melted into tears of true re- 
 pentance. Standing there upon the edge of her chariot, 
 Beatrice delivered the trembling Dante a scathing 
 harangue, in which she accused him of worldliness, of 
 folly, of forgetfulness. 
 
 O'erpowered I fell : and what my state was then. 
 She knows, who was the cause. 
 
 Dante, unconscious, was tenderly lifted by a lady and 
 borne to the water, and gently immersed. The nymphs 
 sang, while Beatrice witnessed the scene from the other 
 
 shore of the river. 
 
 "... Here we are nymphs, 
 And in the heav'n are stars. Or ever earth 
 Was visited by Beatrice, we, 
 Appointed for her handmaids, tended on her. 
 We to her eyes will lead thee. ..." 
 " Turn, Beatrice ! " was their song : " Oh ! turn 
 Thy saintly sight on this thy faithful one, 
 Who, to behold thee, many a weary pace 
 Hath measured. ..." 
 
 Mine eyes with such an eager coveting 
 Were bent to rid them of their ten years' thirst, 
 No other sense was waking. 
 
"beloved FLORENCE." 87 
 
 BEATRICE. 
 
 Longfellow. 
 
 With snow-white veil, and garments as of flame, 
 She stands before thee, who, so long ago, 
 Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe 
 
 From which thy song and all its splendors came ; 
 
 And while with stern rebuke she speaks thy name, 
 The ice about thy heart melts as the snow 
 On mountain heights, and in swift overflow 
 
 Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame. 
 
 Thou makest full confession, and a gleam 
 As of the dawn on some dark forest cast. 
 
 Seems as thy lifted forehead to i ncrease ; 
 
 Lethe and Eunoe, the remembered dream. 
 And the forgotten sorrow brings at last 
 
 That perfect pardon which is perfect peace. 
 
88 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 J. A. Symonds. 
 
 Light, in general, is Dante's special and chosen 
 source of poetic beauty, light everywhere, in the sky 
 and earth and sea, in the star, the flame, the lamp, 
 the gem broken, in the water reflected from the mirror 
 transmitted through the glass, or colored through the 
 edge of the fractured emerald, dimmed in the mist, the 
 halo, the deep water streaming through the rent cloud, 
 glowing in the coal, quivering in the lightning, flash- 
 ing in the topaz and the ruby, veiled behind the pure 
 alabaster, mellowed and clouding itself in the pearl 
 light. . . . 
 
 The Purgatorio is thus made like our familiar world, 
 made to touch our sympathies, as an image of our own 
 purification in the flesh. 
 
 ''As a symbol of Divine Theology, we must forget 
 the maiden of Florence, Dante's earthly love, and con- 
 sider him as through her influence purified from all 
 earthly dross." 
 
 It makes us sad, nevertheless, to lose Virgil, the 
 faithful guide, who so quickly disappears as the splen- 
 dor of a vision of Beatrice meets and satisfies the heart 
 of Dante. From darkness to dawn, Virgil has been 
 loyal to his trust — yet the poet with a few heartfelt 
 tears remands him to the shades. 
 
 Enough that Lethe's waters have purged the sinner 
 
 Dante. 
 
 ** From the most Holy Waters I returned 
 Regenerate in the manner of new trees 
 That are renewed with a new foliage ; 
 Pure, and disposed to mount unto the stars." 
 
" BELOVED FLORENCE." 89 
 
 PART V. 
 
 THE PARADISO. 
 H. W. Longfellow, 
 
 I LIFT mine eyes, and all the windows blaze 
 
 With forms of saints and holy men who died, 
 
 Here martyred and hereafter glorified ; 
 
 And the great Kose upon its leaves displays 
 Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays, 
 
 With splendor upon splendor multiplied ; 
 
 And Beatrice again at Dante's side 
 
 No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise. 
 And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs 
 
 Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love, 
 
 And benedictions of the Holy Ghost ; 
 And the melodious bells among the spires 
 
 O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above 
 
 Proclaim the elevation of the Host ! 
 
90 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 " The Paradiso 
 
 is the least read of the three parts of the Divina Comme- 
 dia, but it is the dearest of all to the student. If you 
 would feel the magic influence of this poem, you must 
 clothe yourself in light, you must be children of the 
 light, you must gaze on the light as with the eagle's 
 undazzled eye. For here Dante leaves earth entirely 
 behind him. 
 
 " Dante is at last suffered to gaze for one instant upon 
 the supernal glory of God, the Trinity in Unity, see- 
 ing as in one dazzling flash, which melts his memory 
 as the sunlight melts the snow, a terrible orb of three 
 different colors, in which the one seems to reflect the 
 other. Speech fails, the waxen wings of poetry are 
 melted and drop useless." — Canon Farrar. 
 
 J. A. Symonds. (Essay.) 
 
 It is a strange world, this Paradiso conceived of by 
 Dante, unlike anything that an earlier poet dreamed 
 or seer saw in trance revealed to him. . . . 
 
 To appreciate the Paradiso rightly, we require (at 
 least a portion) of Shelley's or Beethoven's soul. It 
 is only some " unbodied joy," some spirit rapt by 
 love, above the vapors and the sounds of earth, that 
 dares to soar or can breathe long in this ethereal 
 atmosphere. 
 
 In the Paradiso, " no portrait of a soul is sweeter 
 or more delicately painted than that of Piccarda Do- 
 hati." (Canto iii.) 
 
 Dante finds her among the dreamlike, holy faces, 
 
" BELOVED FLORENCE." 91 
 
 leaning towards him from the cloud. . . . We fancy 
 her seen through shining mist hke one of the 
 white spring lilies of the Alps, frail and faintly per- 
 fumed, exquisitely pure; her very speech has in it a 
 mild radiance, a subdued and pearly lustre as of lilies 
 dewy in the twilight. 
 
 In the Paradiso, the seven planets, according to the 
 Ptolemaic system of astronomy, are the spheres in 
 which dwell the blessed. An eighth sphere is the 
 Fixed Stars; a ninth, the Primum Mobile, or mover 
 of these spheres around the earth. The Empyrean is 
 the highest. These make Paradise, where all are 
 happy, but in varying degrees of bliss. 
 
 Paradiso, Canto I. {Longfellow's Translation). 
 
 . . . O power divine ! lend'st thou thyself to me, 
 So that the shadow of the blessed realm 
 Stamped in my brain I can make manifest. 
 
 "Upward gazed Beatrice, and I saw her, . . . 
 
 . . . When a wondrous thing 
 Drew to itself my sight, and therefore she 
 From whom no care of mine could be concealed 
 Towards me turning, blithe and beautiful, 
 Said unto me, *' Fix gratefully thy mind 
 On God, who to the first star has brought me." 
 
 "And they seemed to enter a cloud, luminous, dense, 
 bright"; "the eternal pearl received them as water 
 receives a ray of light, remaining still unbroken." 
 
 Milman says, in his Church History, " that in the 
 Paradiso there should be a dazzling sameness, a mystic 
 
92 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 indistinctness, an inseparable blending of the real and 
 unreal, is not wonderful, if we consider the nature of 
 the subject, and the still more incoherent and incon- 
 gruous popular conceptions which Dante is to repre- 
 sent and harmonize. 
 
 " It is more wonderful that, with the few elements 
 of Light, Music, and Mysticism, he should, by his 
 singular talent of embodying the purely abstract and 
 metaphysical thought in the liveliest imagery, present 
 such things with the most objective truth, yet without 
 disturbing their fine spiritualism. . . . 
 
 " This spiritualization of penalty gives to the poem 
 a powerful moral bearing. The depth of Hell once 
 sounded, Dante pierces it and reascends upon the 
 other side of the infinite. In rising, he becomes ideal- 
 ized, and thought drops the body as a robe." 
 
 Victor Hugo, in "William Shakespeare." 
 
 "From Virgil he passes to Beatrice; his guide to 
 Hell is the poet; his guide to Heaven is poetry. The 
 epic swells into grander proportions as it continues, 
 but man no longer comprehends it. Purgatory and 
 Paradise are not less extraordinary than Gehenna, but 
 as we ascend we lose our interest. We were somewhat 
 at home in Hell, but are no longer so in Heaven. We 
 cannot recognize our fellows in the angels, perhaps 
 the human eye is not made for such excess of light; 
 and when the poem becomes happy it becomes tedious. 
 . . . After all, what matters it to Dante if you no 
 longer follow him? He goes on without you. He stalks 
 alone, this lion! His work is a miracle." 
 
"beloved FLORENCE." 93 
 
 Lowell's Essays. 
 
 Looked at outwardly, the life of Dante seems to 
 have been an utter and disastrous failure. What its 
 inward satisfaction must have been, we, with the 
 Paradiso open before us, can form some faint concep- 
 tion. To him, longing with an intensity that only the 
 word Dantesque will express, to realize an ideal upon 
 earth, and continually baffled and misunderstood, the 
 far greater part of his mature life must have been labor 
 and sorrow. 
 
 ' ' Thou shalt leave each thing 
 Beloved most dearly ; this is the first shaft 
 Shot from the bow of exile. Thou shalt prove 
 How salt the savor is of others' bread, 
 How hard the passage to descend and cUmb 
 By others' stairs." 
 
 This passage Dante puts into the lips of Cacciaguida, 
 to whom he devotes three cantos of the Paradiso, — 
 XV., xvi., xvii. He esteems him highly, as he names 
 him a Uving topaz, and calls him " that saintly lamp." 
 
 Dante introduces many saints of the Church and 
 Doctors of Theology into the courts of Heaven — 
 Saint Francis, Thomas Aquinas, Benedict, and others. 
 
 In fashion, as a snow-white rose, lay there 
 Before my view the saintly multitude, 
 Which in His own blood Christ espoused. 
 
 Gary's Translation. 
 
 All these, who reign in safety and in bliss, 
 Ages long past or new, on one sole mark 
 Their love and vision fijx'd. O trinal beam 
 Of individual star, that charm 'st them thus ! 
 Vouchsafe one glance to gild our storm below ! 
 
94 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 . . . And as a pilgrim, when he rests 
 Within the temple of his vow, looks round 
 In breathless awe, and hopes some time to tell 
 Of all its goodly state, e'en so mine eyes 
 Cours'd up and down along the living light. 
 
 Turning to look at Beatrice, Dante saw at his side 
 " a senior robed in glory," who bade him look aloft to 
 the third circle from the highest. 
 
 "... Answering not, mine eyes I raised, 
 And saw her where aloof she sat, her brow 
 A wreath reflecting of eternal beams." 
 
 (Dante besought her not to leave him.) ' 
 
 ** O lady ! thou in whom my hopes have rest, . . . 
 
 Thy liberal bounty still toward me keep : 
 
 That, when my spirit, which thou madest whole, 
 
 Is loosened from this body, it may find 
 
 Favor with thee." 
 
 Beatrice graciously — 
 
 "looked down 
 And smiled ; then towards the eternal fountain turned." 
 
 Then Saint Bernard offered his prayers in behalf of 
 Dante: — 
 
 "... Here kneeleth one, 
 Who of all spirits hath reviewed the state, 
 From the world's lowest gap unto this height ; 
 Suppliant to thee he kneels, imploring grace 
 For virtue yet more high, to lift his ken 
 Toward the bliss supreme. And I, who ne'er 
 Coveted sight, more fondly, for myself, 
 Than now for him, my prayers to thee prefer, 
 (And pray they be not scant,) that thou wouldst drive 
 Each cloud of his mortality away." 
 
"beloved FLORENCE." 95 
 
 Dante's power of vision was steadily becoming 
 more refined and intense. 
 
 " Thenceforward what I saw 
 Was not for words to speak nor memory's self." 
 
 Yet it is for power to speak that the suppliant 
 prays, — 
 
 Power, but to leave one sparkle of thy glory 
 
 Unto the race to come that shall not lose 
 
 Thy triumph wholly. . . . 
 
 Here vigor failed the towering fantasy : 
 
 But yet the will roll'd onward, like a wheel 
 
 In even motion, by the love impell'd, 
 
 That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars." 
 
 J. A. Symonds calls the Divina Commedia an Apoc- 
 alypse, not an Allegory, although full of allegoricB. 
 
 Those to whom music, light, and love are elemental 
 as the air they breathe will be at home in Paradiso. 
 
 Discord, hate, and gloom, the passions of the flesh, 
 the tempests of the heart, the toil of the understanding, 
 are found to all satiety in the Inferno. 
 
 Between them both stands the Purgatorio, humane 
 and mild, the temperate zone of that imagined world. 
 
 Dante had beheld a miracle in Beatrice, and so when 
 he exalts her in the Divina Commedia, when by vir- 
 tue of his personal faith he sets her in glory above 
 the saints, near to the Most Holy Virgin herself, and 
 represents her as the favored one of the Almighty, he 
 is but carrying out the fervent conceptions of his Vita 
 Nuova to their required and true conclusions. 
 
96 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 John Lord, in "Beacon Lights." 
 
 The Divina Commedia cannot be understood by- 
 anybody without a tolerable acquaintance with the 
 Middle Ages, when people were ignorant and super- 
 stitious, before the Crusades had ended. 
 
 Dr. Lord thinks Dante not so close an observer of 
 human nature as Shakespeare, nor so learned a man 
 as Milton, but in pathos, intensity, and fiery emphasis 
 he is only to be surpassed by the Hebrew poets and 
 prophets. 
 
 Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero- Worship.^' 
 
 I give Dante highest praise when I say of his Divine 
 Comedy, that it is, in all senses, genuinely a Song. . . . 
 Its depth, and rapt passion, and sincerity, make it mu- 
 sical; go deep enough, there is music everywhere. A 
 true inward symmetry, what one calls an architectural 
 harmony, reigns in it, proportionates it all; architec- 
 tural, which also partakes of the character of music. 
 
 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! 
 It is at bottom the sincerest of all poems — sincerity 
 here, too, we find to be the measure of all worth. The 
 people of Verona, when they saw him on the streets, 
 said, '' See! there is the man that has been in Hell." 
 Ah, yes! he has been in Hell, in hell enough, in long, 
 severe sorrow and struggle. 
 
 Comedies that come out divine are not accomplished otherwise. 
 
97 
 
 The uses of this Dante? 
 
 We will not say much about his uses. A human 
 soul that has once got into the primal element of song, 
 and has sung forth fitly somewhat therefrom, has 
 worked in the depths of our existence, feeding through 
 long times the life-roots of all excellent human things 
 whatsoever in a way that utilities will not succeed 
 well in calculating. 
 
 We will not estimate the sun by the quantity of 
 gaslight it saves us. Dante shall be invaluable, or of 
 no value. 
 
98 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 PART VI. 
 
 John George Hargreave. 
 
 The time came when Dante's great poem was 
 ordered to be read in all the churches, like the Holy 
 Scriptures, when it was made the subject of more com- 
 mentaries than any other book except the Bible, and 
 when any person who was found ignorant of it was 
 denounced as a brute devoid of reason. 
 
 But this time did not come till half a century after 
 the weary tempest-tossed poet had set out to explore, 
 in person, at least one of the worlds he had so vividly 
 portrayed. 
 
 In 1843, there were nearly one hundred translations 
 of Dante's poem, — the "mystic, unfathomable song," 
 as Tieck calls it. 
 
 Germany, perhaps, was the first to catch the true 
 spirit of the original; France was less eager. Voltaire, 
 Lamartine, and other men of wit and learning, said 
 bitter things of it. England and America have brought 
 their tributes of admiration to "the highe poete of 
 Itaille" in thoughts that breathe and words that burn. 
 The admiration of the Rossetti family for Dante 
 reaches the high tide of adoration, — father, sons, and 
 daughters. Their translations, poems, and commen- 
 taries upon their favorite theme fill volumes. The 
 Shadow of Dante, Dante and His Cirde, are a proof of 
 loving devotion. 
 
 Christina Rossetti undervalued her share of the 
 work. She said mournfully, " I wish I, too, could 
 
99 
 
 have done something for Dante in England." She did 
 write a Study of Dante for the Century Magazine of 
 February, 1884, and one for The Churchman^ s Shilling 
 Magazine, entitled An English Classic, and was herself 
 an ardent student of the great poet, and his works in- 
 flenced her thoughts and expressions. 
 
 She wrote to her publisher: " But if ever you re- 
 ceive a Dante book for review, and care to intrust it 
 to me, I would gladly try my hand on it; perhaps en- 
 thusiasm for my subject might make up for scant 
 learning." 
 
 Again she wrote to Mr. Gurney: " Thank you for 
 your Vita Nuova; sweet and tender, and full of regret 
 and hope. May each Dante join his Beatrice, and 
 each Beatrice be or become worthy of her Dante." 
 
 There are eleven letters extant, known to have been 
 written by Dante. These can be found in book-form, 
 translated by a Harvard student, Charles Sterrett La- 
 tham. Although suffering from paralysis so that he 
 had to study and recite much of the time on his couch, 
 he performed this translation (with learned comments 
 of his own) so creditably, that the " Dante Prize " 
 was awarded him. Poor fellow! he had passed into 
 that " Paradiso," where perhaps Dante awaited him 
 (who knows?), before the announcement of the earthly 
 honor had gladdened his heart. 
 
 Dante wrote to a Florentine friend: " If another way 
 shall be found by you or others to return to my 
 country, that does not derogate from the fame or the 
 honor of my good name, then will I gladly take it 
 with no lagging step, but if Florence is entered by no 
 such path, then never will I see Florence." 
 
100 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 To the Lord Can Grande he wrote a letter which 
 gives full explanations of the metaphorical and alle- 
 gorical meanings in his great poem. To this lord he 
 dedicates his "Paradise," — " sublime, and worthy of 
 his friend," he says; and presents it to him. 
 
 This act of courtesy must have taken place in the 
 earlier days of their intercourse, when the poet was 
 a welcome guest at the table of this haughty magnate 
 of Verona. 
 
 Petrarch is the authority for saying that Dante was 
 held in much honor by Can Grande at first, but after- 
 wards by degrees fell out of favor. 
 
 It is even related that his distinguished host insulted 
 him at his own table. 
 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti has written a long poem 
 detailing Dante's unhappy life at the gay court of 
 Verona. 
 
 DANTE AT VERONA. 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 
 Arriving only to depart 
 From court to court, from land to land, 
 Like flame within the naked hand ; 
 His body bore his burning heart, 
 That still in Florence strove to bring 
 God's fire for a burnt-offering. 
 
 Even such was Dante's mood, when now, 
 
 Marked for long years with fortune's sport, 
 
 He dwelt at yet another court ; 
 There where Verona's knee did bow. 
 
 And her voice hailed with all acclaim 
 
 Can Grande delia Scala's name ! 
 
101 
 
 Eat and wash hands, Can Grande ; scarce 
 We know their deeds now ; hands which fed 
 Our Dante with that bitter bread ; 
 
 And thou the watch-dogs of those stairs 
 Which, of all paths his feet knew well, 
 Were steeper found than Heaven or Hell ! 
 
 Dante left many illuminated manuscripts. Monks 
 in the convent cells often spent a lifetime in this deli- 
 cate hand- work. 
 
 Mr. Hawthorne mentions some that he saw in Mr. 
 Kirkup's possession, once owned by Dante, but still 
 retaining the lustre of their gold and vermilion, un- 
 tarnished by the dust of centuries. 
 
 Who knows but that these very ones were wrought 
 by the self-same illuminators, his friends of whom he 
 asks (Purgatorio, canto xi. 80-85, Longfellow's trans- 
 lation), — 
 
 " Art thou not Oderisi, 
 Agobbio's honor, and honor of that art 
 Which is in Paris called illuminating?" 
 ''Brother," said he, *■' more laughing are the leaves 
 Touched by the brush of Franco Bolognese ; 
 All his the honor now, and mine in part. 
 
 " In painting, Cimabue thought that he 
 
 Should hold the field ; now Giotto has the cry, 
 So that the other's fame is growing dim. 
 So has one Guido from the other taken 
 The glory of our tongue, and he perchance 
 Is born, who from the nest shall chase them both.'* 
 
 The two Guidos (one Cavalcanti), Dante's special 
 friend, is introduced in the Inferno, canto x.; the 
 
102 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 other, Giunicelli, in Purgatorio, canto xxvii. Both 
 had great literary fame. Of the latter, Dante says: — 
 
 Those dulcet lays (I answered) which as long 
 
 As of our tongue the beauty does not fade, 
 
 Shall make us love the very ink that trac'd them." 
 
 To his own great name the poet would seem almost 
 indifferent (Gary's translation): — 
 
 " The noise 
 Of worldly fame is but a blast of wind 
 That blows from divers points and shifts its name, 
 Shifting the point it blows from." 
 
 How Shakespearean this sounds, the context as well. 
 
 In 1373, Florence instituted a chair of the Divina 
 Commedia, with Boccaccio as its expounder; He began 
 his lectures one Sunday, but they had only reached 
 the seventeenth line of the seventeenth canto of the 
 Inferno, when the professor was seized with an illness 
 of which he died. 
 
 Poor Florence did try to make some reparation for 
 her folly and shortsightedness. The republic voted a 
 sum of money to be paid to Dante's daughter in the 
 convent, and a monument to the poet, which Michael 
 Angelo would have built, but this was not accom- 
 plished until 1829, when Picci made a cenotaph for 
 Santa Croce. It has three colossal figures, Dante in 
 the center. Poesy and Italy on either side. 
 
 It is said that the manuscript copies of the Divina 
 Commedia made in the fourteenth centur}^ now in 
 European libraries, are more numerous than those of 
 the works of all other authors. 
 
"beloved FLORENCE.'* 103 
 
 In 1472 the first printed copy of the Divina Corn- 
 media appeared. In the sixteenth century there ap- 
 peared forty editions in Italy alone. A hundred years 
 later, a Dante frenzy caught Germany and spread 
 over Europe, though France was slow to respond. 
 
 Voltaire said: "They call Dante divine, but it is a 
 hidden divinity." He afterwards owned that he had 
 found some verses so charming and true that they 
 had not grown old in four hundred years, and would 
 never grow old. Dante did not call his poem " Divine "; 
 Italy did that for him in 1516. He called it a " Com- 
 edy," a French writer explains, because Dante felt 
 himself unworthy to assume the title of " High-Tra- 
 gedy," which belonged to the great poem of his master, 
 Virgil. 
 
 The name seems inappropriate for such serious 
 themes, but we would not, if we could, give it any 
 other title; it would be sacrilege. 
 
 Dante wrote the Convito (The Banquet) some years 
 after finishing the Vita Nuova. 
 
 Professor Norton says that it derives its name from 
 the main design, which was that of providing instruc- 
 tion which should be serviceable in the conduct of life 
 for those who had scant opportunities of learning. 
 This Dante proposed to do, by means of a series of 
 treatises in the vulgar tongue, and in the form of com- 
 ment upon Canzoni (songs) of his own, which, though 
 in appearance poems of love, were in reality poems of 
 morality and philosophy. He says: " If in the present 
 work, which is called the Convito, the discourse be 
 more virile than that of the Vita Nuova, I do not 
 
104 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 therefore intend to discredit the former. In the for- 
 mer I spoke at the entrance to my youth; in the lat- 
 ter, youth being now gone by." 
 
 In the Convito (Dean Church's translation), Dante 
 says: "After that, it was the pleasure of the citizens of 
 that fairest and most famous daughter of Rome — 
 Florence — to cast me forth from the sweet bosom 
 wherein I had been nourished up to the maturity of 
 my life, and in which, with all peace to her, I long 
 with all my heart to rest my weary soul, and finish 
 the time which is given me. I have passed through 
 almost all the regions to which this language reaches, 
 a wanderer, almost a beggar, displaying against my 
 will the stroke of fortune which is ofttimes unjustly 
 wont to be imputed to the person stricken. Truly, I 
 have been a ship without a sail or helm, carried to 
 divers harbors, and gulfs, and shores by that parch- 
 ing wind which sad poverty breathes." 
 
 Dante in his wanderings came one day to the con- 
 vent of San Onorio; entering the inclosure, he stood 
 for some time silent, abstracted, till one of the brothers, 
 observing him, asked what he wanted. Still silent, 
 the monk repeated the question, when Dante, waving 
 his hand, answered but one word, " Peace! " 
 
 The good brother then approached him, taking his 
 hand, and led him to a seat, soothing him with gentle 
 words. Dante's heart was opened, and he talked of 
 his sorrows and tribulations. Before leaving, he drew 
 from his bosom the manuscript of his great poem and 
 presented it to the monk. 
 
"beloved FLORENCE." 105 
 
 TO DANTE. 
 H. W. Longfellow. 
 
 Tuscan, that wanderest through the realms of gloom 
 With thoughtful pace and sad, majestic eyes. 
 Stern thoughts and awful from thy soul arise, 
 Like Farinata from his fiery tomb ! 
 
 Thy sacred song is like the trump of doom. 
 Yet in thy heart what human sympathies. 
 What soft compassion glows as in the skies. 
 The tender stars their clouded lamps relume ; 
 
 Methinks I see thee stand with pallid cheeks 
 By Fra Hilario in his diocese, 
 As up the convent walls in golden streaks 
 
 The ascending sunbeams mark the day's decrease, 
 And as he asks what there the stranger seeks, 
 Thy voice along the cloister whispers, '* Peace ! " 
 
106 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 E. C. Stedman, in "Nature of Poetry." 
 
 After Dante, it may be said that the world is all 
 before us, "where to choose." . . . His own age be- 
 came Dante, as if by one of the metamorphoses in the 
 Inferno. And the Divine Comedy is equally one with 
 its creator. The age, the poem, the poet, alike, are 
 Dante; his epic is a trinity in spirit, as in form. 
 
 Canon Farrar. 
 
 Dante had loved Beatrice, and she had died ; he had 
 loved philosophy, and it had broken as a bruised reed; 
 he had loved Florence, and she had flung him out of 
 her bosom with an implacable fury and resentment. 
 He was doomed in nineteen years of hopeless wander- 
 ing and galling dependence to learn how hard a pace 
 it is to tread a patron's stair. He died in Ravenna, at 
 the age of fifty-six, of a broken heart. A century 
 later, Florence begged for his remains. Even Leo X. 
 and Michael Angelo urged the petition, but were re- 
 fused. In Ravenna, the dust of Dante sleeps until 
 the Judgment Day. Those pine woods were green 
 then, though blighted now, and Dante's life, though 
 blighted then, has put forth the brightest leaves for 
 us in song. But for that despair of heart, he might 
 have been a graceful love-poet, but he never would 
 have written the Divine Comedy. 
 
DEATH-MASK OF DANTE, 
 
-o 
 
 3HX JO 
 
ABOUT DANTE AND HIS "BELOVED FLORENCE." 109 
 FROM A MEMORIAL ODE. 
 
 By permission of the author, Prof. A. G. Newcomer, Stanford University. 
 
 Beneath the pavement of Ravenna lies 
 All that remains of him whose bitter fare 
 Of alien bread sustained him to endure 
 The apocalypse that blasts our weaker eyes, 
 
 The human soul laid bare. 
 All that remains? Nay ; Giotto's penciled truth 
 Hath given over to immortal youth, 
 Unmarred by griefs' and exile's signature, 
 
 Fresh with life's morning kiss. 
 The clear, grave face that looked on Beatrice. 
 And so he lives, dissevered soul and sense. 
 Yet such dividual life were naught 
 
 But that each poet's dower 
 
 Gives him creative power 
 To eke out nature's poor incompetence 
 
 And justify his hour. 
 For his transcendent vision recombines, 
 
 Refining still away 
 What imperfections marked them for decay. 
 The crumbling earth and fleshless pictured lines 
 
 Of Giotto's cunning. Yea, 
 Divining half from what the live hands wrought 
 
 With impress large and strong, 
 And half from what the living accents taught, 
 
 He pieces out the whole. 
 
 Conjecturing the soul 
 From the soul's deeds, the singer from the song, 
 Till recreate, life's laurel round his head. 
 So Dante's self, immortal, perfected. 
 
110 ABOUT DANTE AND HIS 
 
 Dante, like Virgil, his beloved master, wrote his own 
 epitaph. Both are in Latin. Virgil's tomb is in the 
 cleft of the rock in the grotto of Pausilippo, at Naples. 
 
 Dante died in 1321, at the age of fifty-six. He was 
 cared for by the Polenta family at Ravenna, who built 
 his tomb. 
 
 DANTE'S EPITAPH. 
 
 The right of monarchy, the Heavens, the stream of fire, the pit, 
 In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed fit, 
 But since my soul an alien here hath flown to nobler wars, 
 And happier now hath gone to seek its Maker 'mid the stars, 
 Here am I, Dante, shut, exiled from the ancestral shore, 
 Whom Florence the (of ail) least-loving mother bore. 
 
DANTB AND BEATRICE. 
 
ABOUT DANTE AND HIS "BELOVED FLORENCE." 113 
 
 DANTE. 
 
 Eugene Field. 
 
 The rain falls on Ghiberti's gates, 
 
 The big drops hang on purple dates, 
 And yet beneath the ilex shades, 
 Dear trysting-place for boys and maids, 
 
 There comes a form from days of old 
 
 With Beatrice's hair of gold ; 
 The breath of lands on lilied streams 
 Floats through the fabrics of my dreams ; 
 
 And yonder, from the hills of song. 
 
 Where psalmists brood and people throng, 
 The lone, majestic Dante leads 
 His love across the blooming meads. 
 
 UNIVERSITY J 
 
ABOUT 
 
 DANTE 
 
 FRANCES FENTON 5ANB0RN 
 
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