ma against the neighboring cities, or of the
neighboring cities against Parma. What would it have been if this
chronicle, instead of being written by a monk of uncommonly open mind, a
lover of music, at certain times an ardent Joachimite, an indefatigable
traveller, had been written by a warrior? And this is not all; these
wars between city and city were complicated with civil dissensions,
plots were hatched periodically, conspirators were massacred if they
were discovered, or massacred and exiled others in their turn if they
were triumphant.[8] When we picture to ourselves this state of things
dominated by the grand struggles of the papacy against the empire,
heretics, and infidels, we may understand how difficult it is to
describe such a time.

The imagination being haunted by horrible or entrancing pictures like
those of the frescos in the _Campo Santo_ of Pisa, men were always
thinking of heaven and hell; they informed themselves about them with
the feverish curiosity of emigrants, who pass their days on shipboard in
trying to picture that spot in America where in a few days they will
pitch their tent.

Every monk of any notoriety must have gone through this. Dante's poem is
not an isolated work; it is the noblest result of a condition which had
given birth to hundreds of compositions, and Alighieri had little more
to do than to co-ordinate the works of his predecessors and vivify them
with the breath of his own genius.

The unsettled state of men's minds was unimaginable. That unhealthy
curiosity which lies at the bottom of the human heart, and which at the
present day impels men to seek for refined and even perverse enjoyments,
impelled men of that time to devotions which seem like a defiance to
common sense.

Never had hearts been shaken with such terrors, nor ever thrilled with
such radiant hopes. The noblest hymns of the liturgy, the _Stabat_ and
the _Dies Irae_, come to us from the thirteenth century, and we may well
say that never has the human plaint been more agonized.

When we look through history, not to find accounts of battles or of the
succession of dynasties, but to try to grasp the evolution of ideas and
feelings, when we seek above all to discover the heart of man and of
epochs, we perceive, on arriving at the thirteenth century, that a fresh
wind has blown over the world, the human lyre has a new string, the
lowest, the most profound; one which sings of woes and hopes to which
the ancient wor