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I fancy, the rigorous earnest man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make happy. We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podesta, or whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbors, and the world had wanted one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung.
From Italy, where the European ferment, both in its political and its spiritual character, mainly centred, came the prophecy of the new day, in a poet's "vision of the invisible world" Dante's Divina Commedia wherein also the deeper history of the visible world of man was both embodied from the past and in a measure predetermined for the human race.
He died, so far as there is any certainty in dates, in 1300, during the brief period of Dante's power in Florence, when the poet was one of the priors and much engaged in public business; and the same eventful year concluded the existence of Cimabue, the first of the great school of Florentine painters he whose picture was carried home to the church in which it was to dwell for all the intervening centuries with such pride and acclamation that the Borgo Allegri is said to have taken its name from this wonderful rejoicing....
Let us trace his remote footsteps, as we have opportunity: To Dr. Symonds, Clifton. "Falmouth, June 28th, 1841. Newman writes to me that he is gone to the Rhine. I wish I were! And yet the only 'wish' at the bottom of my heart, is to be able to work vigorously in my own way anywhere, were it in some Circle of Dante's Inferno.
As day broke on the 31st August, I dropped down several thousand feet from Doyen to Ramghat in the Indus valley, and it suddenly struck me I must have come down too low, and got into Dante's Inferno. As I passed under the crossbeam of the suspension bridge, I looked to find the motto, "All hope relinquish, ye who enter here."
Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante's noticing how the dog's skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.
Parsons's excellent translation of Dante's poem, a specimen of which appeared so long since, bearing their imprint. City Poems. By ALEXANDER SMITH, Author of "A Life Drama, and other Poems." Boston: Ticknor & Fields. On the first appearance of Alexander Smith, criticism became light-headed, and fairly exhausted its whole vocabulary of panegyric in giving him welcome.
It is also possible to so absorb Dante's thought and so saturate one's self with the life of the poem as to add to one's individual capital of thought and experience all that the poet discerned in that deep heart of his and wrought out of that intense and tragic experience.
Dante's high and various gifts, his supreme poetic gift, the noble character and warm individuality of the man, with the pathos of his personal story, the full, lively transcript he hands down of the theology and philosophy of his age, his native literary force as molder of the Italian language, his being the bold, adventurous initiator, the august father of modern poetry all this has combined to keep him and his verse fresh in the minds of men through six centuries.
Interesting as this work may be for the illustration of the "Divine Comedy" as understood by Dante's immediate successors, we turn from it with a sense of relief to admire the saints and angels ranged in goodly row, "each burning upward to his point of bliss" whereby the painter has depicted Paradise.
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