Italian
scene, ran, all warm from the wheels of their spinning, the threads of
Italian politics at the culmination of the papal imperial conflict;
and that breast throbbing with the fiery passions of republican Italy,
while behind the throb beat the measure of a poetic soul impelled to
tune the wide, variegated cacophony. Proud, passionate, and baffled,
the man Dante deeply swayed the poet. Much of his verse is directly
woven out of his indignations and burning personal griefs. At times,
contemporaneous history tyrannized over him.

Dante's high and various gifts, his supreme poetic gift, the noble
character and warm individuality of the man, with the pathos of his
personal story, the full, lively transcript he hands down of the
theology and philosophy of his age, his native literary force as
molder of the Italian language, his being the bold, adventurous
initiator, the august father of modern poetry--all this has combined
to keep him and his verse fresh in the minds of men through six
centuries. But even all this would not have made him one of the three
or four world-poets, would not have won for him the wreath of
universal European translation. What gave his rare qualities their
most advantageous field, not merely for the display of their peculiar
superiorities, but for keeping their fruit sound and sweet, was that
he is the historian of hell, purgatory, and heaven--of the world to
come such as it was pictured in his day, and as it has been pictured
more or less ever since--the word-painter of that visionary, awful
hereafter, the thought of which has ever been a spell.

Those imaginations as to future being--to the Middle Ages so vivid as
to become soul-realities--Dante, with his transcendent pictorial
mastership, clothed in words fresh and weighty from the mine of
popular speech, stamping them with his glittering imperial
superscription. Imaginations! there are imaginations of the future,
the reverse of poetical. Hunger will give you tormenting imaginations
of breakfasts and dinners; avarice enlivens some minds with pictures
of gains that are to be. But imaginations of the life beyond the
grave, these we cannot entertain without spirituality. The having them
with any urgency and persistence implies strong spiritual
prepossessions: men must be self-possessed with their higher self,
with their spirit. The very attempt to figure your disembodied state
is an attempt poetical. To succeed with any distinctness denotes s