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When I leave the wood, I proceed to a well, and thence to the place which I use for snaring birds, with a book under my arm Dante, or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets, like Tibullus or Ovid. I read the story of their passions, and let their loves remind me of my own, which is a pleasant pastime for a while.
At first the news seemed incredible to those that had not ocular proof of its verity, but these soon were convinced. Was not Messer Guido Cavalcanti riding through the city gates, whither all were now running, and was not Messer Dante by his side, and your humble servant who writes these lines, and many another youth well known to the Florentine populace?
Dante could not have been easy to live with upon any terms. "Eh, puir fellow! he looks like a verra ill-tempered mon," quoth Carlyle once after a long contemplation of the poet's portrait.
Editions of Dante and books about Dante crowd his room they are constantly coming. I asked him once if he was going to write on the subject, but he shook his head." "It must be a very engrossing study," remarked Mrs. Jacks, with her most intelligent air. "Dante opens such a world." "Strange!" murmured her husband, with his kindly smile. "The last thing I should have imagined."
Now it must be confessed that the poetry of Chaucer does not abound in the moral wisdom and spiritual insight and profound reflections on the great mysteries of human life which stand out so conspicuously in the writings of Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, Goethe, and other first-class poets. He does not describe the inner life, but the outward habits and condition of the people of his times.
Giotto died in 1336, but as Dante was banished, and was even sentenced to be burned, in 1302, it was obvious the work must have been executed before that time; since the portrait of one outlawed and capitally convicted as an enemy to the commonwealth would never have been ordered or tolerated in the chapel of the royal palace.
Italians associate the name of Michael Angelo with those of the divine poet Dante and the painter Raphael, and these three are spoken of as the three greatest men of their country in what are called the modern days. Michael Angelo died at Rome in 1564, when eighty-nine years old.
Everybody will remember as a pendant but one so much more grave that we hesitate to cite it, though the coincidence is curious the pause made by Dante in the beginning of the Inferno, which resembles so exactly the pause in Scott's career.
It was so unpromising in its present exterior, so graphic in its story of misfortune, and so terrible in its recent memories, that the most sanguine prospector would have passed it by, as though the hopeless sentence of Dante had been written over its ragged portal.
During the Middle Ages it was one of the most famous of European seats of learning. Dante spent several years in Padua after his banishment from Florence, and Petrarch once lived here. All these things had been talked over before they alighted at the station, and, driving through one of the gates of the city, went to their hotel. All were eager to see whatever there was of interest.
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