here.

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him; that
awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its Florences
and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence thou shalt
never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt surely see! What
is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life altogether? ETERNITY:
thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou and all things bound! The
great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home more and more in that
awful other world. Naturally his thoughts brooded on that, as on the one
fact important for him. Bodied or bodiless, it is the one fact important
for all men:--but to Dante, in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty
of scientific shape; he no more doubted of that _Malebolge_ Pool, that it
all lay there with its gloomy circles, with its _alti guai_, and that he
himself should see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if
we went thither. Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in
speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into "mystic
unfathomable song; " and this his _Divine Comedy_, the most remarkable of
all modern Books, is the result.

It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see, a
proud thought for him at times, That he, here in exile, could do this work;
that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from doing it, or
even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that it was great;
the greatest a man could do. "If thou follow thy star, _Se tu segui tua
stella_,"--so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in his extreme need,
still say to himself: "Follow thou thy star, thou shalt not fail of a
glorious haven!" The labor of writing, we find, and indeed could know
otherwise, was great and painful for him; he says, This Book, "which has
made me lean for many years." Ah yes, it was won, all of it, with pain and