honor his great life-labor,--even his immortal poem, which should be a
transcript of his thoughts, a mirror of his life, a record of his
sorrows, a painting of his experiences, a description of what he saw, a
digest of his great meditations, a thesaurus of the treasures of the
Mediaeval age, an exposition of its great and leading ideas in
philosophy and in religion. Every great man wishes to leave behind some
monument of his labors, to bless or instruct mankind. Any man without
some form of this noble ambition lives in vain, even if his monument be
no more than a cultivated farm rescued from wildness and sterility.

Now Dante's monument is "the marvellous, mystic, unfathomable song," in
which he sang his sorrows and his joys, revealed his visions, and
recorded the passions and sentiments of his age. It never can be
popular, because it is so difficult to be understood, and because its
leading ideas are not in harmony with those which are now received. I
doubt if anybody can delight in that poem, unless he sympathizes with
the ideas of the Middle Ages; or, at least, unless he is familiar with
them, and with the historical characters who lived in those turbulent
and gloomy times. There is more talk and pretension about that book than
any one that I know of. Like the "Faerie Queene" or the "Paradise Lost,"
it is a study rather than a recreation; one of those productions which
an educated person ought to read in the course of his life, and which if
he can read in the original, and has read, is apt to boast of,--like
climbing a lofty mountain, enjoyable to some with youth and vigor and
enthusiasm and love of nature, but a very toilsome thing to most people,
especially if old and short-winded and gouty.

In the year 1309 the first part of the "Divine Comedy," the _Inferno_,
was finished by Dante, at the age of forty-four, in the tenth year of
his pilgrimage, under the roof of the Marquis of Lunigiana; and it was