long memorable. Dante, for depth of sincerity, is like an
antique Prophet too; his words, like theirs, come from his very heart.
One need not wonder if it were predicted that his Poem might be the
most enduring thing our Europe has yet made; for nothing so endures as a
truly spoken word. All cathedrals, pontificalities, brass and stone,
and outer arrangement never so lasting, are brief in comparison to an
unfathomable heart-song like this: one feels as if it might survive,
still of importance to men, when these had all sunk into new
irrecognizable combinations, and had ceased individually to be. Europe
has made much; great cities, great empires, encyclopaedias, creeds,
bodies of opinion and practice: but it has made little of the class
of Dante's Thought. Homer yet _is_ veritably present face to face with
every open soul of us; and Greece, where is _it_? Desolate for thousands
of years; away, vanished; a bewildered heap of stones and rubbish, the
life and existence of it all gone. Like a dream; like the dust of King
Agamemnon! Greece was; Greece, except in the _words_ it spoke, is not.

The uses of this Dante? We will not say much about his "uses." A human
soul who has once got into that primal element of _Song_, and sung forth
fitly somewhat therefrom, has worked in the _depths_ of our existence;
feeding through long times the life-roots of all excellent human
things whatsoever,--in a way that "utilities" will not succeed well in
calculating! We will not estimate the Sun by the quantity of gaslight
it saves us; Dante shall be invaluable, or of no value. One remark I
may make: the contrast in this respect between the Hero-Poet and the
Hero-Prophet. In a hundred years, Mahomet, as we saw, had his Arabians
at Grenada and at Delhi; Dante's Italians seem to be yet very much where
they were. Shall we say, then, Dante's effect on the world was small in
comparison? Not so: his arena is far more restricted; but also it is far
nobler, clearer;--perhaps not less but more important. Mahomet speaks
to great masses of men, in the coarse dialect adapted to such; a dialect
filled with inconsistencies, crudities, follies: on the great masses
alone can he act, and there with good and with evil strangely blended.
Dante speaks to the noble, the pure and great, in all times and places.
Neither does he grow obsolete, as the other does. Dante burns as a pure
star, fixed there in the firmament, at which the great and the high of
all ages kind