imprisonment of
thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too, a silent scornful
one: the lip is curled in a kind of godlike disdain of the thing that is
eating out his heart,--as if it were withal a mean insignificant thing,
as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle were greater than it.
The face of one wholly in protest, and lifelong unsurrendering battle,
against the world. Affection all converted into indignation: an
implacable indignation; slow, equable, silent, like that of a god! The
eye too, it looks out as 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, Aristotelean 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 of 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 thenceforth 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 wit