We see her walking through the streets of Florence, kneeling before the altar at church, smiling and making merry at parties, and weeping at funerals. The figure is dim, it is true, half real, half ideal; but there is too much passion, tenderness, and unconscious truth in the poet's language to leave us in any doubt as to her existence. When next he speaks of her, nine years had again passed away. This time he sees her in the street, dressed in pure white and in company with two ladies both older than herself. Dante stood by timidly and she spoke to him. This simple salutation filled him with unutterable bliss; he calls it ineffable courtesy, worthy of reward in the eternal world. He was intoxicated with sweetness, and turned away to brood in solitude over his happiness. How true and natural it all seems through the mist of intervening years - love Old and yet ever new, and simple and beautiful always." In order to get sight of her he haunted the streets and churches. They show you to-day in the court of the Palazzo Salviati, which occupies the site of Folco Portinari's house, the nicchia di Dante, where the poet is supposed to have waited and watched for Beatrice. He tried to conceal the real state of affairs by feigning love for another; and so successful was he that Beatrice, whether from jealousy or other reasons we know not, refused to speak to him any more. This filled him with inexpressible grief. We have already seen in the opening passage of the New Life the strange mingling of mysticism, personification, and scholastic use of Latin. The passage describing Dante's grief may be taken as a piece of simple and tender pathos.1 It came to pass some time after this that he saw Beatrice at a wedding, and so strong an emotion came over him that all present saw it and laughed at him. He grew pale and faint, he trembled; and the very stones cried out, "Die, die!" Though he says nothing definite about it, many have supposed this was Beatrice's own wedding; hence the strong feelings of the poet. She had been affianced in early youth to Simone de' Bardi, whom she afterward married. This may account for the fact that Dante seems never to have deemed it possible for him to marry her. And yet, after all, it is not necessary to seek such an explanation, for we know that the love of chivalry was something different from conjugal affection. Indeed, in the fantastic ideas of the age love could not exist in the married state. No very definite information of actual events can be gathered from the 1 See § XII. New Life. The poet speaks obscurely and by way of allusion. He wrote for ladies and lovers; it was the deeper spiritual phases of love he sought to describe, and the events of everyday life were of no great importance to him. The visions he sees, the thoughts that sway his mind, the tears and sighs, the longing to see his lady, and his purpose to speak her praise these are the themes of his book. Thus in the beautiful sonnet beginning, "Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare he gives no detail of her appearance, the color of her eyes or hair, whether she is tall or slender, but only the effect of her beauty on the passers-by when she appears in the street. And yet here and there we do get a glimpse of actual events. We learn that the father of Beatrice dies, and that he was a good man. But this is told in a line or two, while whole pages are devoted to the grief of the daughter and to Dante's sympathetic sorrow. At one time Dante fell grievously ill and was in sore pain. Then there came to him those solemn thoughts of life and death which come at some time or another to all men the short, bird-like flight across the lighted chamber of life, and then the unknown dark hereafter. As he pondered on the frailty of human life, with startling suddenness a dread presentiment fell upon him. He said to himself, "It needs must be that Beatrice shall die." In a horrible vision strange ladies came to him and said, "Thou too shalt die "; and hideous faces cried out, "Thou art dead." Then as the fever-trance proceeded he saw women with dishevelled hair, the sun grew dark, birds fell from the air, and a pale-faced, hoarse-voiced man cried out, "Dead is thy lady." He was then taken into a room where she was lying so sweetly and quietly that she seemed to say, "Lo, I am in peace." This dark presentiment which had haunted his fever-troubled brain finally came true. A poem which he had started breaks off in the middle and is followed by these words from the Book of Lamentations: "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow, she that was great among the nations!" Beatrice was dead. It is very characteristic of the book that in the first few pages after this event, instead of giving expression to his sorrow, the poet goes into a discussion of the symbolic number nine. Beatrice, whom he had met in her ninth year, died on the ninth day of the ninth month, in the ninth decade of the century. But after this there is no lack of feeling or weeping. His grief was so bitter that purple rims were about his eyes. He grew wan and pale and longed to die. The only consolation he could find was in writing poems in praise of her who had gone from him forever. The episode of a certain gentle lady whom he saw looking compassion 1 § XXVI. ately upon him from a window, and whom he took pleasure in seeing and thinking of, comes in like a discordant note to mar the lyric purity of these last pages of grief. Some have conjectured that this was Gemma Donati, whom he afterward married; others see in her only the symbol of philosophy. Whoever she was, wife or symbol or passing fancy, this interlude in his mourning lasted but a short time. In a vision he saw Beatrice in the same crimson dress she had worn at their first meeting; and as the memories of a lifetime rushed over him her love entered his breast once more, there to set up its everlasting rest. And then, after the final sonnet of the book, exalted by the consciousness of his own genius, he exclaims in words of prophetic beauty: "After writing this sonnet, it was given unto me to behold a very wonderful vision—wherein I saw things which determined me that I would say nothing further of this most blessed one, until such time as I could discourse more worthily concerning her. And to this end I labor all I can; as she well knoweth. Wherefore if it be his pleasure through whom is the life of all things, that my life continue with me a few years, it is my hope that I shall yet write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman. After the which, may it seem good unto Him who is the Master of Grace, that my spirit should go hence to behold the glory of its lady: to wit, of that blessed Beatrice who now gazeth continually on his countenance qui est per omnia sæcula benedictus." With the death of Beatrice and Dante's despairing grief the New Life ends. The days of childhood and youth are past. The man is about to enter on that stormy and troublous career the story of which, with its bitter sense of injustice and its sorrow almost unto death, together with a new hope and love, this time, however, the love of God, is told in that "poem of the earth and air," the Divine Comedy. III. An enterprising publisher once asked Victor Hugo to prepare for him a selection from his works to be issued in one volume. The French writer replied with characteristic indignation, "Would you ask a tourist to bring you from Chamouni a pebble as a sample of Mont Blanc ?" It is with such a feeling as this that one attempts to give an idea of Dante's Divine Comedy within the narrow limits of an introduction. The poem is so vast that at first approach we are overpowered. Only after long and earnest study can we realize its greatness and seize the multitudinous details comprised in its mighty structure. And yet, as Dean Church says, "those who know the Divina Commedia best will best know how hard it is to be interpreter of such a mind; but they will sympathize with the wish to call attention to it. They know, and would wish others to know also, not by hearsay, but by experience, the power of that wonderful poem." 'A book parts of which Ruskin has declared to be little short of the miraculous, a book containing passages that Walter Savage Landor and Goethe have placed far above all other poetry, a book that has won the lifelong devotion of such scholars as Hegel and Schopenhauer, Tholuck and Schelling, Longfellow and Lowell—such a book must surely be worthy of study. The outer form which Dante gave to his poem was nothing new or original. Visions of journeys into the other world were common during the Middle Ages. The limits between the unseen life and ours were not so definite then as now, and the undiscovered country seemed very real. The mysteries, and the miracle plays with their three stages representing Earth, Heaven, and Hell, which were often produced in the public squares of Italian cities, were undoubtedly as familiar to Dante as the puppet shows of the Faust legend, long after, were to the boy Goethe, to whom they gave the first suggestions of that drama which was to sum up all the development of his mind and soul. As the year 1000 drew near, the whole Christian world was expectant of the millennium foretold by St. John, when Satan, after being bound a thousand years, should be loosed, and Death and Hell should deliver up their dead. The terror which then smote men's souls can still be seen in the literature and customs of the times. Human imagination, stirred by the vision of the seer of Patmos, penetrated into the mysteries of the life to come, and out of the details given by St. John -the bottomless pit, the lake of brimstone and fire, the dragons and serpents, the angels and the great white throne – men wrought a whole system of supernatural worlds. These fancies and speculations were written and read and told, and passed into the very life of mediæval society. It is useless to seek for any one vision which may have served Dante as a model; there were a number of them, and he simply followed the beliefs of his time in giving to his poem the form of a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. What differentiated him, however, from his predecessors is that he made his vision a carefully wrought-out allegory which, besides containing wonderful poetry, is also an epitome of the poet's own life and of the whole medieval world. That the allegory exists there can be no doubt; Dante himself distinctly tells us so, if the letter to Can Grande della Scala be genuine. What the real meaning is has been the subject of more or less discussion. The older commentators, such as Boccaccio and Pietro Alighieri, make the allegory a religious one- "to free men from their sins, to direct them toward the purgation of their souls, and to strengthen them in holiness and virtue," says the latter. Later commentators, on the other hand, have been more inclined to give a politico-historical meaning to the allegory. Both are probably right. But there is a personal allegory in the poem as well. Dante himself is the chief actor. He it is who is lost in the world of sin, who is repulsed from the mount of peace and consolation by the wolf, the panther, and the lion. Virgil, representing Earthly Wisdom, or Reason, and Beatrice, representing Divine Wisdom, or Illuminating Grace, lead him through the darksome ways of Hell and up over the craggy heights of Purgatory to the Paradise of God. We are told that it is necessary for Dante to make this journey in order to gain full experience of God's purpose and to reach that liberty which is more precious than life itself. But when he has reached the heaven of the fixed stars, where he sees the glory of Christ surrounded by the apostles, St. Peter, with holy indignation at the corruption of the Church, tells him to relate his vision to the world lying in sin and suffering: "And thou, my son, when thou shalt return below, open thou thy mouth and hide not what I hide not from thee." Not only is the world lying in spiritual wretchedness, but owing to the unholy desire for temporal power on the part of God's vicar, the Pope, all Italy is full of war, murder, and rapine; city is arrayed against city, family against family; and pity, patriotism, and religion seem lost forever in the "endless dark" of civil strife. To change this state of things Dante wrote his poem. Ugo Foscolo says that the poet undoubtedly believed his mission to be apostolic and consecrated. His was not to reform the Church alone, as Luther did, but the world, society, man. Virgil, as Reason, was to show men the folly of the political suicides of the day; Beatrice, as Faith, was to lift their eyes to those hills whence cometh all help. But, after all, the allegory is not the most important part of the Divine Comedy. The poem compels our undying admiration because it is a drama in which we see moving across the stage the mighty forms of all lands and ages. Greece and Rome are there; and Dante, boldest among poets, gives us a living, breathing picture of his own times and country. Among these spirits who have left such deep footprints on the sands of time we see the grim figure of the poet himself— the exile and partisan, full of hate and indignation, yet inspired by the noblest ideals for Church and State, and touched by the tenderest sympathy for all that is sweet and good. It is this intensely personal stamp that makes the Divine Comedy so real; the throbbings of the poet's heart, the longings of his soul, his words of fierce denunciation, with the sublime poetry in which they are embalmed, make the book unique among the world's books. In order to obtain a clear conception of Dante's journey through the three supernatural kingdoms, we must have some intelligent idea of his universe. His system of astronomy was that of Ptolemy. Take any spherical substance and let that represent the earth, - for Dante knew that the earth is round, cut out of it a section in the shape of an inverted cone, the apex being at the centre; remove this and place its base on the surface of the sphere exactly opposite the place whence it was taken. The -- |