dignation: an implacable indignation;
slow, equable, silent, like that of a god! The eye, too, it looks out
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, Aristotelian 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 great subtlety; this best fruit of
education he had contrived to realize 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 henceforth 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 ever with his whole
strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself was wedded; but
it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy the rigorous earnest
man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make
happy.

We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him
as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podesta or whatsoever they
call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbors,--and the w