Magistrates of Florence. He had met in boyhood a certain Beatrice
Portinari, a beautiful little girl of his own age and rank, and grown up
thenceforth in partial sight of her, in some distant intercourse with her.
All readers know his graceful affecting account of this; and then of their
being parted; of her being wedded to another, and of her death soon after.
She makes a great figure in Dante's Poem; seems to have made a great figure
in his life. Of all beings it might seem as if she, held apart from him,
far apart at last in the dim Eternity, were the only one he had ever with
his whole strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself was
wedded; but it seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the rigorous
earnest man, with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make
happy.

We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him as
he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podesta, or whatsoever they call
it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbors,--and the world had wanted
one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence would have had
another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries continued
voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there will be ten of
them and more) had no _Divina Commedia_ to hear! We will complain of
nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and he, struggling
like a man led towards death and crucifixion, could not help fulfilling it.
Give _him_ the choice of his happiness! He knew not, more than we do, what
was really happy, what was really miserable.

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some other
confused disturbances rose to such a height, that Dante, whose party had
seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly forth into
banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and wandering. His
property was all confiscated and more; he had the fiercest feeling that it