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Updated: June 1, 2025
March, 1868. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 3 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. THE task of a translator is a thankless one at best.
I know the Commedia of Alighieri, and Petrarca, and I have read the Gerusalemme Liberata with Professor Grandi, and I can repeat all of the Vita Nuova by heart, and some of the " "For the present that is enough," said the count. "If you nothing better to do have, will you so kind be as to begin?" "Begin?" said Nino, not understanding.
And when with the re-establishment of an universal government her importance declined and at length passed away, she yet lived on in the minds and the memory of men as something fabulous and still, curiously enough, as a refuge, the refuge of the great poet of the new age; so that to-day, beside the empty tombs of Galla Placidia and Theodoric, there stands the great sarcophagus which holds the dust of Dante Alighieri.
It is with this man that a universal interest in Ravenna may be said for a moment to revive, for it was he who had the honour to be the host of Dante Alighieri. Guido Novello was not a mere adventurer like Guido Vecchio, he was a man of considerable culture, with a love of learning and of the arts.
Have these historians of hearts and souls duties at all inferior to the historians of external facts? Does any one think that Alighieri has any fewer things to say than Machiavelli? Is the under side of civilization any less important than the upper side merely because it is deeper and more sombre? Do we really know the mountain well when we are not acquainted with the cavern?
It is many a long year since my dear friend Messer Guido dei Cavalcanti died of that disastrous exile to which, by the cynical irony of fate, my other dear friend, Messer Dante dei Alighieri, was foredestined to doom him. That sadness has nothing to do with this sadness, and I here give it the go-by.
Dante was born in Florence, of the noble family of Alighieri, which was attached to the papal, or Guelph party, in opposition to the imperial, or Ghibelline. He was but a child when death deprived him of his father; but his mother took the greatest pains with his education, placing him under the tuition of Brunetto Latini, and other masters of eminence.
* There is in Marbodius's narrative a passage very worthy of notice, viz., that in which the monk of Corrigan describes Dante Alighieri such as we picture him to ourselves to-day. The miniatures in a very old manuscript of the "Divine Comedy," the "Codex Venetianus," represent the poet as a little fat man clad in a short tunic, the skirts of which fall above his knees.
I was sorry to deny Messer Guido in anything or to deprive myself of the comfort of his company. But I had come to that place to keep a tryst. "I cannot," I said. "I wait here for young Dante of the Alighieri."
Which conduct on his part, for all that it was intended for the best, did not, as so often happens with the devices of human cunning, have the best result. For of course, in a city like Florence, where gossip is blown abroad like thistle-seed, it came soon enough to the ears of Madonna Beatrice that young Messer Dante of the Alighieri was believed by many to be a lover of Madonna Vittoria.
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