all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling

they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices
and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call _musical

Thought_. The Poet is he who _thinks_ in that manner. At bottom, it turns
still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision

that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart
of Nature _being_ everywhere music, if you can only reach it.

The _Vates_ Poet, with his melodious Apocalypse of Nature, seems to hold a
poor rank among us, in comparison with the _Vates_ Prophet; his function,

and our esteem of him for his function, alike slight. The Hero taken as
Divinity; the Hero taken as Prophet; then next the Hero taken only as Poet:

does it not look as if our estimate of the Great Man, epoch after epoch,
were continually diminishing? We take him first for a god, then for one

god-inspired; and now in the next stage of it, his most miraculous word
gains from us only the recognition that he is a Poet, beautiful

verse-maker, man of genius, or such like!--It looks so; but I persuade
myself that intrinsically it is not so. If we consider well, it will

perhaps appear that in man still there is the _same_ altogetherpeculiar
admiration for the Heroic Gift, by what name soever called, that there at

any time was.
I should say, if we do not now reckon a Great Man literallydivine, it is

that our notions of God, of the supreme unattainable Fountain of Splendor,
Wisdom and Heroism, are ever rising _higher_; not altogether that our

reverence for these qualities, as manifested in our like, is getting lower.
This is worth taking thought of. Sceptical Dilettantism, the curse of

these ages, a curse which will not last forever, does indeed in this the
highest province of human things, as in all provinces, make sad work; and

our reverence for great men, all crippled, blinded, paralytic as it is,
comes out in poor plight, hardly recognizable. Men worship the shows of

great men; the most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to
worship. The dreariest, fatalest faith; believing which, one would

literallydespair of human things. Nevertheless look, for example, at
Napoleon! A Corsican lieutenant of artillery; that is the show of _him_:

yet is he not obeyed, worshipped after his sort, as all the Tiaraed and
Diademed of the world put together could not be? High Duchesses, and

ostlers of inns, gather round the Scottish rustic, Burns;--a strange
feeling dwelling in each that they never heard a man like this; that, on

the whole, this is the man! In the secret heart of these people it still
dimly reveals itself, though there is no accredited way of uttering it at

present, that this rustic, with his black brows and flashing sun-eyes, and
strange words moving laughter and tears, is of a dignity far beyond all

others, incommensurable with all others. Do not we feel it so? But now,
were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality, and all that sorrowful brood,

cast out of us,--as, by God's blessing, they shall one day be; were faith
in the shows of things entirely swept out, replaced by clear faith in the

_things_, so that a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the
other non-extant; what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!

Nay here in these ages, such as they are, have we not two mere Poets, if
not deified, yet we may say beatified? Shakspeare and Dante are Saints of

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

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 godlikedisdain 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 earnestintelligent 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
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
was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight of God and man. He tried what

was in him to get reinstated; tried even by warlike surprisal, with arms in
his hand: but it would not do; bad only had become worse. There is a

record, I believe, still extant in the Florence Archives, dooming this
Dante, wheresoever caught, to be burnt alive. Burnt alive; so it stands,

they say: a very curious civic document. Another curious document, some
considerable number of years later, is a Letter of Dante's to the

Florentine Magistrates, written in answer to a milder proposal of theirs,
that he should return on condition of apologizing and paying a fine. He