its fame has been steadily increasing, although I fear much of the
popular enthusiasm is exaggerated and unfelt. One who can read
Italian well may see its "fiery emphasis and depth," its condensed
thought and language, its supernal scorn and supernal love, its
bitterness and its forgiveness; but few modern readers accept its
theology or its philosophy, or care at all for the men whose crimes
he punishes, and whose virtues he rewards.

But there is great interest in the man, as well as in the poem
which he made the mirror of his life, and the register of his
sorrows and of those speculations in which he sought to banish the
remembrance of his misfortunes. His life, like his poem, is an
epic. We sympathize with his resentments, "which exile and poverty
made perpetually fresh." "The sincerity of his early passion for
Beatrice," says Hallam, "pierces through the veil of allegory which
surrounds her, while the memory of his injuries pursues him into
the immensity of eternal light; and even in the company of saints
and angels his unforgiving spirit darkens at the name of Florence. . . .
He combines the profoundest feelings of religion with those
patriotic recollections which were suggested by the reappearance of
the illustrious dead."

Next to Michael Angelo he was the best of all famous Italians,
stained by no marked defects but bitterness, pride, and scorn;
while his piety, his patriotism, and elevation of soul stand out in
marked contrast with the selfishness and venality and hypocrisy and
cruelty of the leading men in the history of his times. "He wrote
with his heart's blood;" he wrote in poverty, exile, grief, and
neglect; he wrote like an inspired prophet of old. He seems to
have been specially raised up to exalt virtue, and vindicate the