followed in spite of warning
dreams, false images, and now, to save him in his own despite, she has
"visited ... the Portals of the Dead," and chosen Virgil for his courier?
While Gino da Pistoia complains that in his _Commedia_ his "lovely
heresies ... beat the right down and let the wrong go free":

"Therefore his vain decrees, wherein he lied,
Must be like empty nutshells flung aside;
Yet through the rash false witness set to grow,
French and Italian vengeance on such pride
May fall like Anthony on Cicero."

Dante himself sings to Giovanni Guirino "at the approach of death";

"The King, by whose rich grave his servants be
With plenty beyond measure set to dwell,
Ordains that I my bitter wrath dispel,
And lift mine eyes to the great Consistory."

V

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with
ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from
remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our
uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by
the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no
fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere
life, had pleasure for his end. Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth,
were dissipated men, the one a drunkard, the other a drunkard and mad
about women, and yet they had the gravity of men who had found life out
and were awakening from the dream; and both, one in life and art and one
in art and less in life, had a continual preoccupation with religion. Nor
has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist.
The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose
to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion
is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in
position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to
be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the
momentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from
Lethe's wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation
of reality, tradition offers us a different word--ecstasy. An old artist
wrote to me of his wanderings by the quays of New York, and how he found
there a woman nursing a sick child, and drew her story from her. She
spoke, too, of other children who had died: a long tragic story. "I
wanted to pai