from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too,
a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of godlike disdain
of the thing that is eating-out his heart,--as if it were withal a
mean insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and
strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and
life-long unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all
converted into indignation: an implacable indignation; slow, equable,
silent, like that of a god! The eye too, it looks-out as in a kind of
_surprise_, a kind of inquiry, Why the world was of such a sort? This
is Dante: so he looks, this 'voice of ten silent centuries,' and sings
us 'his mystic unfathomable song.'

The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well enough with
this Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper
class of society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then
going; much school-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latin
classics,--no inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things:
and Dante, with his earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt,
learned better than most all that was learnable. He has a clear
cultivated understanding, and of great subtlety; the best fruit of
education he had contrived to realise from these scholastics. He knows
accurately and well what lies close to him; but, in such a time,
without printed books or free intercourse, he could not know well what
was distant: the small clear light, most luminous for what is near,
breaks itself into singular _chiaroscuro_ striking on what is far off.
This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he had gone
through the usual destinies; been twice out campaigning as a soldier
for the Florentine State, been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth
year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of the
Chief Magistrates of Florence. He had met in boyhood a certain
Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank,
and grown-up thenceforth in partial sight of her, in some distant
intercourse with her. All readers know his graceful affecting account
of this; and then of their being parted; of her being wedded to
another, and of her death soon after. She makes a great figure in
Dante's Poem; seems to have made a great figure in his life. Of all
beings it might seem as if she, held apart from him, far apart at last
in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had eve