Poetry; really, if we will think of it, _canonized_, so that it is impiety
to meddle with them. The unguided instinct of the world, working across
all these perverse impediments, has arrived at such result. Dante and
Shakspeare are a peculiar Two. They dwell apart, in a kind of royal
solitude; none equal, none second to them: in the general feeling of the
world, a certain transcendentalism, a glory as of complete perfection,
invests these two. They _are_ canonized, though no Pope or Cardinals took
hand in doing it! Such, in spite of every perverting influence, in the
most unheroic times, is still our indestructible reverence for heroism.--We
will look a little at these Two, the Poet Dante and the Poet Shakspeare:
what little it is permitted us to say here of the Hero as Poet will most
fitly arrange itself in that fashion.


Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his Book;
yet, on the whole, with no great result. His Biography is, as it were,
irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrow-stricken man,
not much note was taken of him while he lived; and the most of that has
vanished, in the long space that now intervenes. It is five centuries
since he ceased writing and living here. After all commentaries, the Book
itself is mainly what we know of him. The Book;--and one might add that
Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot
help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it. To me it is a most
touching face; perhaps of all faces that I know, the most so. Lonely
there, painted as on vacancy, with the simple laurel wound round it; the
deathless sorrow and pain, the known victory which is also
deathless;--significant of the whole history of Dante! I think it is the
mournfulest face that ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic,
heart-affecting face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness,
tenderness, gentle affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed