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This is all attractive and delightful; but the people wants stamina, wants conscience, wants self-reverence. Dante's soul has died out of the land. Enough of this. As for France, I have 'despaired of the republic' for very long, but the nation is a great nation, and will right itself under some flag, white or red. Don't you think so?
Straightening herself after the unexpected knocks and bruises, she looked aghast at the scene before her. Whole streets of them, plazas of them, these endlessly gyrating male and female loons; swirls of gayety, twisting, upsetting passers-by like a cyclone; arms, bodies and legs frantically waving, as at the very brink of Dante's Inferno!
You know already how the God of Love, in very person, had ridden, visible only to the eyes of Dante, by Dante's side that night, though the vision vanished at the time when the lances of the Dragon-flag rode out of the sheltering wood to welcome our coming.
For Christianity was an élite religion, in which all were called, but few chosen, differing from Mohammedanism and Buddhism, which grasped and conquered all within their reach: the effect of Christ rather resembling Plato's and Dante's, it would seem: but Mahomet's more like Homer's and Shakespeare's.
Dante's head has been restored. It was in 1857 that the Bargello was again converted, this time to its present gracious office of preserving the very flower of Renaissance plastic art. Of this court what can I say?
Far back in the gallery we took another hoist and descended some two hundred feet more, then wound off again through the mountain by more labyrinthian burrowings in the rock, winding, undulating passages, often so low we must crawl on hands and knees, with no other light than the flickering candles half-showing shadowy forms of naked, copper-colored beings; the shadows giving them often fiendish faces and movements, until we could easily imagine ourselves in the realms of Dante's imagination.
How the subject of Sordello was suggested to Browning we do not know; the study of Dante may have led him to a re-creation of the story of Dante's predecessor; after having occupied in imagination the old towns of Germany and Switzerland Würzburg and Basil, Colmar and Salzburg he may have longed for the warmth and colour of Italy; after the Renaissance with its revolutionary speculations, he may have wished to trace his way back to the Middle Age, when men lived and moved under the shadow of one or the other of two dominant powers, apparently fixed in everlasting rivalry the Emperor and the Pope.
The strength and the intelligence of Dante's love of Art are shown in many beautiful passages and allusions in the "Divina Commedia." There was something of universality, not only in his imagination, but also in his acquisitions. Of the sources of learning which were then open, there was not one which he had not visited; of the fountains of inspiration, not one out of which he had not drunk.
Finally it sums up their error being evident, and it being, therefore, time to learn the truth and this it does where it says, "Because to the healthy mind," etc. Translated by Katharine Hillard. "The Banquet" is the least known of Dante's prose writing. It is believed to have been written in his maturity, but was not completed.
While Dante early took an interest in the political affairs which distracted Florence, and was of a stern and somewhat forbidding character, mingling study with action, Petrarch, humanist and scholar as he was, represents also the more polite accomplishments of his time, as he was a most polished courtier and somewhat vain of his fair person. Dante's whole exterior was characteristic of his mind.
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