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"Well, perhaps it is a fairy tale, but it is in the future. I have an idea." "Oh, is that all? But it is the first time. I understand." Listen. Have you read Dante?" "I know the Vita Nuova by heart, and some of the Commedia. But how the diavolo does Dante enter into this question?" "And Silvio Pellico, and a little literature?" continued Ercole, not heeding the comment. "Yes, after a fashion.

Liszt talked of his plans for compositions. He said he wished to express in music his impressions of Dante's "Divina Commedia," with a diorama of scenic effects. To fit out the diorama, it needed about $15,000. The princess, carried away with the idea, offered him the money from her own purse.

In recognition of the same characteristic, Coleridge says, "In picturesqueness Dante is beyond all other poets, ancient or modern, and more in the stern style of Pindar than of any other. Michael Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of the 'Divina Commedia." Dante, eminent in poetic gifts, has many sides, but this is his strongest side: he is preëminently a poet of form.

So much was written on a piece of paper. We gave him chocolate, and at intervals I repeated to him my only Italian, the first line of the Divina Commedia. He seemed cheered. The van jolted on through the fading light. Once a man stepped out on to the track, stopped us, and clambered silently up. We went on. It was the doctor, who had been visiting some lonely hut in the woods.

Life, Faith, and Death, Judgment and Purgatory, Hell and Paradise or Glory, are the motives carved out in stone in this unique narthex, so masterful in the execution, and so vivid in the tale it tells, that we can compare its author to Dante, and call the Portico de la Gloria the "Divina Commedia" of architecture.

The "Vita Nuova" is chiefly occupied with a series of visions; the "Divina Commedia" is one long vision. The sympathy with the spirit and impulses of the time, which in the first reveals the youthful impressibility of the poet, in the last discloses itself in maturer forms, in more personal expressions.

Physical science is doing its legitimate work in pushing further and further back the unanalyzable residuum of Nature, but, however far back, an ultimate unanalyzable residuum there must always be; and when physical science brings us to this point it hands us over to the guidance of psychological investigation just as in the Divina Commedia Virgil transfers Dante to the guidance of Beatrice for the study of the higher realms.

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.

As to the question which of the two is the greater production, it is like asking which is the greater, Dante's "Commedia" or Shakspeare's "Macbeth"? They are incommensurable. As to which is the more generally interesting, no question can arise. There are thousands who enjoy and admire the First Part to one who even reads the Second.

Ian had bought also, in a small thick volume, the poems of Shelley: these gave them not only large delight, but much to talk about, for they were quite capable of encountering his vague philosophy. Then they had their Euclid and Virgil and even tried their mental teeth upon Dante, but found the Commedia without notes too hard a nut for them.