has
written, or probably he may ever write to ---- ----."

"SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY.

"Beyond our shores, beyond the Apennines,
Shakespeare, from heaven came thy creative breath!
'Mid citron grove and overarching vines
Thy genius wept at Desdemona's death:
In the proud sire thou badest anger cease,
And Juliet by her Romeo sleep in peace.
Then rose thy voice above the stormy sea,
And Ariel flew from Prospero to thee.

"July 1, 1860."

Dante was not one of Landor's favorites, although he was quite ready to
allow the greatness of _il gran poeta_. He had no sympathy with what he
said was very properly called a comedy. He would declare that about one
sixth only of Dante was intelligible or pleasurable. Turning to Landor's
writings, I find that in his younger days he was even less favorable to
Dante. In the "Pen_te_meron" (the author spelling it so) he, in the garb
of Petrarch, asserts that "at least sixteen parts in twenty of the
_Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_ are detestable both in poetry and principle;
the higher parts are excellent, indeed." Dante's powers of language, he
allows, "are prodigious; and, in the solitary places where he exerts his
force rightly, the stroke is irresistible. But how greatly to be pitied
must he be who can find nothing in Paradise better than sterile
theology! and what an object of sadness and consternation he who rises
up from hell like a giant refreshed!" While allowing his wonderful
originality, Landor goes so far as to call him "the great master of the
disgusting"! Dante is not sympathetic.

Yet he wrote the glorious episode of Francesca da Rimini, of which
Landor's Boccaccio says: "Such a depth of intuitive judgment, such a
delicacy of perception, exists not in any other work of human genius;
and from an author who, on almost all occasions, in this part of the
work, betrays a deplorable want of it."

Landor used often to say what Cleone has written to Aspasia,--"I do not
believe the best writers of love-poetry ever loved. How could they write
if they did? where could they collect the thoughts, the words, the
courage?" This very discouraging belief admits of argument, for there is
much proof to the contrary. Shelley and Keats could not write what they
had not felt; and Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, the most
exquisite love-poems in the English language, came direct from the
heart. It were hardly possible to make poetry while living it;