Dante alighieri biography essay book free

Dante was a very great poet, a man of the strongest passions, a claimant of unbounded powers to lead and enlighten the world; and he lived in a semi-barbarous age, as favourable to the intensity of his imagination, as it was otherwise to the rest of his pretensions. Party zeal, and the fluctuations of moral and critical opinion, have at different periods over-rated and depreciated his memory; and if, in the following attempt to form its just estimate, I have found myself compelled, in some important respects, to differ with preceding writers, and to protest in particular against his being regarded as a proper teacher on any one point, poetry excepted, and as far as all such genius and ene In that part of the book of my memory before the which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying, Incipit Vita Nova.

Under such rubric I find written many things; and among them the words which I purpose to copy into this little book; if not all of them, at the least their substance. Nine times already since my birth had the heaven of light returned to the selfsame point almost, as concerns its own revolution, when first the glorious Lady of my mind was made manifest to mine eyes; even she who was called Beatrice by many who knew not wherefore.

She had already been in this life for so long as that, within her time, the starry heaven had moved towards the Eastern quarter one o O'er better waves to speed her rapid course The light bark of my genius lifts the sail, Well pleas'd to leave so cruel sea behind; And of that second region will I sing, In which the human spirit from sinful blot Is purg'd, and for ascent to Heaven prepares.

And charming 'Boccaccio of ours wrote the life and manners of so sublime a poet just as though he were writing the Filocolo, or the Filostrato.

Here, O ye hallow'd Nine! Sweet hue of eastern sapphire, that was spread O'er the serene aspect of the pure air, High up as the first circle, to mine eyes Unwonted joy renew'd, soon as I IN the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray Gone from the path direct: and e'en to tell It were no easy task, how savage wild That forest, how robust and rough its growth, Which to remember only, my dismay Renews, in bitterness not far from death.

Yet to discourse of what there good befell, All else will I relate discover'd there. How first I enter'd it I scarce can say, Such sleepy dullness in that instant weigh'd My senses down, when the true path I left, But when a mountain's foot I reach'd, where clos'd The valley, that had pierc'd my heart with dread, I look'd aloft, and saw his shoulders broad Already vested with that planet's beam, Who His glory, by whose might all things are mov'd, Pierces the universe, and in one part Sheds more resplendence, elsewhere less.

In our next Essay we shall endeavour to show how the free spirit of the artist and the theologian merges into that of the Educationist: how the.

In heav'n, That largeliest of his light partakes, was I, Witness of things, which to relate again Surpasseth power of him who comes from thence; For that, so near approaching its desire Our intellect is to such depth absorb'd, That memory cannot follow. Nathless all, That in my thoughts I of that sacred realm Could store, shall now be matter of my song.

Benign Apollo! Thus far hath one of steep Parnassus' brows Suffic'd me; henceforth there