into sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud hopeless pain.
A soft ethereal soul looking out so stern, implacable, grim-trenchant, as
from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice! Withal it is a silent pain too, a
silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of godlike disdain of the
thing that is eating out his heart,--as if it were withal a mean
insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle
were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and lifelong
unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all converted into
indignation: an implacable indignation; slow, equable, silent, like that
of a god! The eye too, it looks out as in a kind of _surprise_, a kind of
inquiry, Why the world was of such a sort? This is Dante: so he looks,
this "voice of ten silent centuries," and sings us "his mystic unfathomable
song."

The little that we know of Dante's Life corresponds well enough with this
Portrait and this Book. He was born at Florence, in the upper class of
society, in the year 1265. His education was the best then going; much
school-divinity, Aristotelean logic, some Latin classics,--no
inconsiderable insight into certain provinces of things: and Dante, with
his earnest intelligent nature, we need not doubt, learned better than most
all that was learnable. He has a clear cultivated understanding, and of
great subtlety; this best fruit of education he had contrived to realize
from these scholastics. He knows accurately and well what lies close to
him; but, in such a time, without printed books or free intercourse, he
could not know well what was distant: the small clear light, most luminous
for what is near, breaks itself into singular _chiaroscuro_ striking on
what is far off. This was Dante's learning from the schools. In life, he
had gone through the usual destinies; been twice out campaigning as a
soldier for the Florentine State, been on embassy; had in his thirty-fifth
year, by natural gradation of talent and service, become one of the Chief