behold the sun and the stars? Can I not
under every climate of heaven meditate the sweetest truths, except I
first make myself a man of ignominy in the face of Florence?"

Looking merely at outward success, men would have called the life of
Dante a failure and his career a blighted career. But his misery was
the condition of his immortal greatness. He endured for many a year
the insults of the foolish and the company of the base, and on earth
he did not find the peace for which his heart so sorely yearned. He
died in 1321, at the age of fifty-six, of a broken heart, and lies,
not at the Florence which he loved, but at Ravenna, near the now
blighted pine woods, on the bleak Adrian shore. But if he lost himself
he found himself. He achieved his true greatness, not among the bloody
squabbles of political intrigue, but in the achievement of his great
works, and above all of that "Divine Comedy," which was "the
imperishable monument of his love of Beatrice, now identified with
Divine Philosophy--his final gift to humanity and offering to God."

On the consummate greatness of that poem as the one full and perfect
voice of many silent centuries I only touch, for it would require a
volume to elucidate its many-sided significance. It is not one thing,
but many things. In one aspect it is an autobiography as faithful as
those of St. Augustine or of Rousseau, though transcendently purer
and greater. It is a vision, like the "Pilgrim's Progress" of John
Bunyan, but written with incomparably wider knowledge and keener
insight. It is a soul's history, like Goethe's "Faust," but attaining
to a far loftier level of faith and thoughtfulness and moral
elevation. It is a divine poem, like Milton's "Paradise Lost,"
dealing, as Milton does, with God and Satan, and heaven and hell, but
of wider range and intenser utterance. With the plays of Shakespeare,
in their oceanic and myriad-minded variety, it can hardly be compared,
because it originated under conditions so widely different, and was
developed in an environment so strangely dissimilar. It is, moreover,
one poem, while they form a multitude of dramas. But few would
hesitate to admit that in reading Dante we are face to face with a
soul, if less gifted yet less earthly than that of Shakespeare; a soul
which "was like a star and dwelt apart"--

"Soul awful, if this world has ever held
An awful soul."

I would urge all who are unacquainted with Dante to read, or rather to
study