evelopment of unparalleled consistency and
unity. The course of the events of his life shaped itself in accordance
with an ideal of the imagination, and to this ideal his works
correspond. His first writing, in his poems of love and in the story of
the 'New Life,' forms as it were the first act of a drama which proceeds
from act to act in its presentation of his life, with just proportion
and due sequence, to its climax and final scene in the last words of the
'Divine Comedy.' It is as if Fate had foreordained the dramatic unity
of his life and work, and impressing her decree upon his imagination,
had made him her more or less conscious instrument in its fulfillment.

Had Dante written only his prose treatises and his minor poems, he would
still have come down to us as the most commanding literary figure of the
Middle Ages, the first modern with a true literary sense, the writer of
love verses whose imagination was at once more delicate and more
profound than that of any among the long train of his successors, save
Shakespeare alone, and more free from sensual stain than that of
Shakespeare; the poet of sweetest strain and fullest control of the
resources of his art, the scholar of largest acquisition and of
completest mastery over his acquisitions, and the moralist with higher
ideals of conduct and more enlightened conceptions of duty than any
other of the period to which he belonged. All this he would have been,
and this would have secured for him a place among the immortals. But all
this has but a comparatively small part in raising him to the station
which he actually occupies, and in giving to him the influence which he
still exerts. It was in the 'Divine Comedy' that his genius found its
full expression, and it is to this supreme poem that all his other work
serves as substructure.

The general scheme of this poem seems to have been early formed by him;
and its actual composition was the main occupation of his years of
exile, and must have been its main, one might say its sufficient,
consolation. Never was a book of wider scope devised by man; and never
was one more elaborate in detail, more varied in substance, or more
complete in execution. It is unique in the consistency of its form with
its spirit. It possesses such organic unity and proportion as to
resemble a work of the creative spirit of Nature herself.

The motive which inspired Dante in the 'Divine Comedy' had its source in
his sense of the wretchednes