202
NOTES AND QUERIES. [io s. VIL MARCH ie, 1907.
in his library in a little box covered with
glass, and one day, when showing them
to a visitor, he said, " Think of it ! Six
hundred years ago the bit of wood in that
box touched Dante's bones."
While Dante is his longest effort, his work included translations from the French, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, German, Danish, and Anglo-Saxon ; and many of these shorter pieces are unsurpassed. His versions of German are far ahead of other attempts, and some might well pass as original. He was equally happy as a translator of Italian ; and from a Lapland source he got the immortal lines :
A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
Indeed, he found perpetual inspiration in phrases from his varied store of foreign knowledge.
Like Irving in his ' Sketch-Book ' and Nathaniel Hawthorne in ' Our Old Home,' Longfellow gave the world in ' Outre-Mer ' a notable book of travel impressions. Stedman in * Poets of America ' says : " He stimulated our taste by choice pre- sentation of what is rare and choice abroad. With thoughts of this singer come thoughts of peace, of romance, of the house made beautiful by loving hands." The work was first published in its complete form by Messrs. Harper & Brothers in 1835, and Longfellow, on paying his second visit to Europe in the same year, arranged for an English edition to be published by Bentley. In his preface he refers to the perils of an unknown author,
"who launches forth into the uncertain current of public favor in so frail a bark as this ! The very rocking of the tide may overset him ; or per- adventure some freebooting critic, prowling about the great ocean of letters, may descry his strange colors, hail him through a gray goose-quill, and perhaps sink him without more ado."
While he was writing ' Outre-Mer ' the duties of his professorship in Bowdoin College and the preparation of textbooks took up most of his time, so it was only by working late into the night that he was able to complete his book. This, he tells us, he did when
" the morning watches had begun, and as I write, the melancholy thought intrudes upon me, To what end is all this toil? Of what avail these midnight vigils? Dost thou covet fame? Vain dreamer ! A few brief days, and what will the busy world know of thee? Alas! this little book is but a bubble on the .stream ; and although it may catch the sunshine for a moment, yet it will soon float down the swift-rushing current and be seen no more."
The first work written by Longfellow in his Cambridge home, in the Washington
chamber of Craigie House, was ' Hyperion,'
published in New York in 1839. He called
it ' Hyperion '
" because it mores on high, among clouds and stars. and expresses the various aspirations of the soul of man. It is all modelled on this idea, style and all. It contains my cherished thoughts for three years."'
JOHN C. FRANCIS. (To be continued.)
DANTEIANA.
1.
INF.' xv. 55 :
Se tu segui tua stella.
Surely Brunetto here makes use of a phrase* common to all times and climes, yet Mr. Tozer maintains that Stella in 1. 55 " is to be taken in a metaphorical sense, rather than as referring to the constellation under which he [Dante] was born." The matter is not, perhaps, worth disagreement between anno- tators, yet the allusion is so obvious that one is startled to meet with an interpretation adverse to the obvious. " Se tu segui," paraphrases Bianchi, " le inclinazioni che avesti da natura per influsso di benigna stella. Cio e detto secondo i principi astrologici." Scartazzini also evidently re- garded the allusion in an astrological sense : Stella. Nacque Dante quando il sole era in Gemini, 'Par.' xxii. 110 e seg., e gli astrologi del tempo credevano che Gemini fosse ' signih'catore di scrittura, e di scienza e di eognoscibilitade ' (Ott. ) Cf. 'Inf.' xxvi. 23 e seg." Read in the light of either reference
Si che se stella buona, and
gloriose Stelle, o lume pregrio Di gran virtu
it is astounding how the initial allusion can be regarded in any other light than astro- logical .
2. Ibid., 67-8 :
Vecchia fama nel mondo li chiama orbi,
Gente avara, invidiosa e superba. ary's note supplies one of the usual inter- pretations of this passage thus :
"It is said that the Florentines were thus called, n consequence of their having been deceived by a shallow artifice practised on them by the Pisans, in
- he year 1117."
See G. Villani, lib. iv. cap. xxx.
Scartazzini gives this tradition more fully, prefacing it by another, also from Villani, and calls the expression a proverb " questo proverbio." How is it such ? To be blind n the sense of deception by others bears, 3erhaps, the semblance of a proverb ; as Scartazzini puts it, "I Fiorentini malav- >ed::ti (e pero furono poi sempre in pro-
