proceeds. Of
Shakespeare, England was born. Without resemblance to one another, on
their thrones in the ideal each sits alone. Behind them is the past, at
their feet the present, before them the centuries unroll. They are the
immortals. They have all time as we all have our day. It is from them we
get our daily bread. Their genius feeds our starving soul. Talent has
never done that. Talent makes us laugh and forget and yawn. Talent is
agreeable, it provides us with pleasures, with means of getting rid of
time. But to the heart it brings no message, for the soul it has no food.
It is ephemeral, not eternal. Only genius and its art endure.

The genius of Dante, Beatrice awoke, of his art she was the inspiration.
For that be she, as he called her, Blessed,--thrice Blessed since she did
not love him. Had she loved him, he could not have done better, that is
not possible, and he might have omitted to do as well.

Dante made Francesca say of Paolo:

Questi che mai da me non fia diviso,
La bocca mi bacio tutto tremente.

Francesca added:

_Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante_--we read no more that day. Nor on
any other. Had she, from whom Dante is equally inseparable, tremblingly
kissed his mouth, it may be that not their reading merely but his writing
would have ceased. But Dante, whom Petrarch called a miracle of nature,
was not Paolo. Far from attempting to kiss Beatrice he did not even aspire
to such a grace. He had, as the genius should have, everything, even to
sex, in his brain, a circumstance that might have preserved him from Gemma
Donati and la Gentucca,--the first, his wife; the second, another's--dual
infidelities for which, at the summit of Purgatory, Beatrice, who, in the
interim, had become very feminine, reproached him with slow scorn.

For punishment he beheld her. The spectacle of her beauty was such that
memories of his sins seared him like thin flames. He was in Purgatory. But
Beatrice who in a cloud of flowers--_un nuvola di fiori_--had come,
forgave him. Together then their ascension began. _Ella guardava suso, ed
io in lei._ She looked above and he at her. In the mounting his sins fell
by. As they did so her beauty increased. In proportion to his redemption
she became more fair.

That picture, at once real and ideal, displayed in its exquisiteness the
miracle of two hearts saving and embellishing each other. Set at the
threshold of modern life it prefigured what love was to be, what