vated Guido Novello da Polenta. Here he spent the last seven years of his life, furnished with a fitting home, his wants supplied, treated personally with deference and love, employed in honorable offices. When he died, his remains were honored with an imposing funeral. His body, robed as a Franciscan friar, lay in state in the palace of the Polentas; his hands resting on the open Bible; a golden lyre, with broken chords, lying at his feet. The erection of a becoming monument was prevented only by the misfortunes and banishment of Guido himself.

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In spite, however, of these exceptions, Dante's word is true, It is rare for exiles to meet with friends." The picture of him in Paris, deserted, destitute, hungry; sitting on straw in the Latin Quarter listening to the University lecturers; admitted, after extemporaneously defending propositions on fourteen different subjects, to the highest degree, and obliged to forego the honor for lack of means to pay the fee, yet consoled by the hope of an enduring fame, is pathetic and exciting. How touching, too, are his words in the treatise "De Vulgari Eloquio"!

"I grieve over all sufferers; but I have most pity for those, whoever they may be, who, languishing in exile, never see their native land again, except in dreams." Yet, with the force of his invincible soul, he rallies upon divine resources, and enjoys ideal substitutes and equivalents for what he is deprived of in actuality. 'Shall I not enjoy," he exclaims, "the light of the sun and the stars? Shall I not be able to speculate on most delightful truth under whatever sky I may be?"

There are truly two Dantes, one, the young Dante of the "Vita Nuova"; the other, the mature Dante of the "Divina Commedia." The first is represented in the portrait by Giotto, with its meditative depth, feminine softness and sadness; the second, in the more familiar traditional effigy, with its haggard, recalcitrant features, iron firmness, and burning intensity, its mystic woe and supernal pity. Both of these characters are abundantly revealed by his own pen, since almost everything he wrote has an autobiographic value, both direct and in

direct. He often narrates the events of his life, and records his feelings and judgments, in the first person. Furthermore, the contents of his works take the form of experiences passing through his soul, and reproduced by his art in stereoscopic photographs that at once reflect the delicate lineaments of his genius and betray the tremendous power of his passions.

The dominant characteristic, in a moral aspect, of the younger Dante, — of Dante as he was by nature and culture, is the tenderest and most impassioned ideal love, frankly exposing itself on every side, and seeking sympathy. He speaks, confesses, implores, with an exuberant impulsiveness of self-reference like that of Cicero, whom he studied and loved; and he describes his painful consciousness of loving and thirst for love, with a fulness of self-portrayal like that of Petrarch. This phase in the character and life of Dante has been for the most part overlooked; but no one can read his "Vita Nuova" and his "Canzoniere," with reference to this point, and fail to recognize it. Free from the foibles of Cicero and the extravagances of Petrarch, fully possessed of what was best and most original in them, Dante, in his first literary development, is the true link between the humane philosopher of Rome and the romantic poet of Vaucluse. He had the learned scope and effusive sympathy of the one; and he had the clinging, introspective Christian sentiment and faith of the other. The Romantic Literature, -between which and the Classic Literature Petrarch stands with a hand on either, - that glorious outbreak of the spirit of chivalry and letters and song, under the breath of the Provençal bards, contains little or nothing of value which may not be found clearly pronounced in the youthful poems of Dante. He says that, when his lady passes by,

Love casts on villain hearts a blight so strong,

That all their thoughts are numbed and stricken low;
And whom he grants to gaze on her must grow

A thing of noble stature, or must die.

Humboldt has expatiated on his sensibility to the charms of nature, as evinced in the truth and grace of his inci

dental descriptions. Tradition also proves his love of valleys, forests, high prospects, and wild solitude, by identifying many of his tarrying-places during his exile with the most secluded and romantic spots. The inextinguishable relish of revenge and disdain, the ferocity of hate embodied in such passages as the description of Filippo Argenti, by which Dante is popularly recognized, are not more unapproachable in their way than the numerous passages of an earlier date in which he expresses his love, his unhappiness, his craving for attention and sympathy, are in theirs. Nothing can surpass the confiding softness of his trustful and supplicatory unveiling of the tender sentiments of his heart. He shuts himself "in his chamber, and weeps till he looks like one nigh to death"; his " eyes are surrounded with purple circles from his excessive suffering.". "Sinful is the man who does not feel for me and comfort me." He even takes "the most distasteful path, that of invoking and throwing myself into the arms of pity."—"Seeking an outlet for my grief in verse, I composed the canzone beginning

The eyes that mourn in pity of the heart

Such pain have suffered from their ceaseless tears,
That they are utterly subdued at last :

And would I still the ever-gnawing smart

That down to death is leading all my years,

Forth in wild sobs must I my misery cast.

"In order that the conflict within me might not remain unknown, save to the wretched man who felt it, I resolved to compose a sonnet which should express my pitiable state." "My self-pity wounds me as keenly as my grief

itself."

My bitter life wearies and wears me so,
That every man who sees my deathly hue
Still seems to say, "I do abandon thee."

Such was the native Dante, exquisitely affectionate, sensitive, confiding, melancholy, lonesome, baring his weaknesses, and yearning for sympathy.

What an incredible exterior change, when we turn from

:

this romantic portrait, and contemplate the elder Dante; Dante as he became in self-defence against the cruel injustice and hardships he endured! Then he blushed with shame a look from Beatrice made him faint he said, "My tears and sighs of anguish so waste my heart when I am alone, that any one who heard me would feel compassion for me." Now, encased in his seven-fold shield of pride, he scorns the shafts of wrong and of ridicule, saying, “I feel me on all sides well-squared to fortune's blows." He never lost his interior tenderness for humanity; his enthusiasm for the sublime sentiments of poesy and religion; his vital loyalty to truth, beauty, liberty. But, towards the frowns of his foes and the indifference of the world, he put on an adamantine self-respect which shed all outward blows. He incarnates, as he is commonly seen, an unconquerable pride, lofty as the top of Etna, hard as its petrified lava, hot as its molten core, but interspersed with touches of pity and love as surpris->› ingly soft and beautiful as though lilies and violets suddenly bloomed out of the scoriæ on the edge of its crater. His contemporary, Giovanni Villani, describes him as "a scholar, haughty and disdainful, who knew not how to deal gracefully with the ignorant." He himself, in his great poem, makes his ancestor Cacciaguida foretell, that of all his future calamities, what will try him most is "the vile company amidst which he will be thrown." Disgust and scorn of the plebeian herds of aimless, worthless men, however, never became an end with him, a pleasure in itself, but merely a means by which he protected himself against the wrongs and lack of appreciation he suffered. They served as an ideal foil by which he kept himself on the eminence where God had set him, - saved his nobility and dignity from sinking even with his fortunes. This is what distinguishes the office of a generous pride from that arrogant and poisonous egotism which feeds itself with misanthropy. The pride which nourished the virtue and undying usefulness of Dante, which helped to keep his genius from decay, and alone kept his will from drooping, has no alliance with the stung and exuding conceit of selfish men-haters. This is why the hau

teur is grand in him which in a Menecrates is ludicrous, and in a Swift detestable.

In the twenty-fifth canto of the last part of the "Divina Commedia," Dante prophesies that he shall return to ungrateful Florence, and receive the laurel-wreath beside the font where he was baptized. Then, in present default of this fruition, he makes St. Peter crown him in Paradise. What a royal comfort to give himself this ideal meed! What matchless courage to dare to paint the fruition with his own hand, and hold the picture before mankind! He always felt himself in others with wonderful keenness, and passionately coveted love, and its phantom, - fame. But after his disappointments and exile, he would not bend to ask for either. In the free realm of the soul he imperiously appropriated them, and bade posterity ratify the boons.

The progress of his poem mirrors the perfecting of his character. In the “Inferno” he says:—

Now needs thy best of man;

For not on downy plumes nor under shade
Of canopy reposing, fame is won,

Without which whosoe'er consumes his days
Leaveth such vestige of himself on earth
As smoke in air or foam upon the wave.

But at length, in the "Paradiso," weaned from the fretful Babel, calmly pitying the ignoble strife and clamor, he looks down, from the exalted loneliness of his own religious mind, on the fond anxiety, the vain arguments, the poor frenzies of mortal men.

In statutes one, and one in medicine,

Was hunting this, the priesthood followed; that,
By force of sophistry, aspired to rule;

To rob, another; and another sought,

By civil business, wealth; one, moiling, lay

Tangled in net of sensual delight;

And one to wistless indolence resigned.

What time from all these empty things escaped,
With Beatrice, I thus gloriously

Was raised aloft, and made the guest of heaven.

The beginning is the most easily appreciated by the vul