t is only from the side of their color
that they made any special appeal to him.

Most people have been led to think of Dante as not a student of
nature, because that impression would inevitably be gathered from
certain passages of John Ruskin with regard to him. Ruskin was so
faithful and loving a student of Dante that he would be expected not
to be {343} mistaken in such a matter, nor is he; but he has dwelt
overmuch on certain phases of Dante's lack of interest in nature,
until the great Florentine's devotion to creation as he saw it around
him is obscured. It is not difficult to show, from Dante's own
writings, how much he was interested in nearly every phase of nature
and natural phenomena. In the "Westminster Review" for July and
August, 1907, Mr. George Trobridge, in articles on Dante as a Nature
Poet, has furnished abundant evidence to prove his thesis, though he
too has felt the necessity for apologizing for even apparently
differing from so great a critic and such an enthusiastic Dante
student as Ruskin. Dante's works, however, themselves can be the only
appeal in this matter, and Mr. Trobridge has used them with good
effect and in such a way as to carry to anyone the conviction that
Dante was a profound student of nature in all her moods and tenses.
Mr. Trobridge says in the introduction:

"It will appear presumptuous in the present writer to differ from so
great a critic and such an enthusiastic student of Dante as Ruskin,
but it seems to him that the author of Modern Painters has done
scant justice to the intense insight of the poet into the beauties
of the world we live in and his wonderful power of expressing what
he saw. There are few even modern poets who have taken so wide a
view of the field of nature, and even Shakespeare himself scarcely
excells the great Florentine in felicity and concentration of
expression. The Divina Commedia is full of vivid pictures covering
the whole range of natural phenomena. As these pass before our eyes,
we can scarcely realize that the painter of them is not of our own
day, so thoroughly does he enter into the spirit of modern landscape
art. {344} Sometimes his pictures are momentary impressions--studies
of effects painted with a large brush; at others his touch is of a
Preraphaelitic nicety, and now and then he gives us a studied
composition full of doubtful detail like one of Turner's landscapes.
He was one with Wordsworth in his sin