sacred to the fame of a father made again illustrious in his children, which will be cherished with a warm reverence by all heedful students. The poem of "Dante at Verona" stands apart among the rest with a crown on it of the like consecration, as perhaps the loftiest monument of all raised by the devotion of a race of genius for two generations of noble work and love. All incidents and traditions of the great poet's exile are welded together in fusion of ardent verse to forge a memorial as of carven gold. The pure plain ease and force of narrative style melt now and then into the fire of a sad rapture, a glory of tragedy lighting the whole vision as with a funereal and triumphal torch. Even the words of that letter in which Dante put away from him the base conditions of return—words matchless among all that ever a poet found to speak for himself, except only by those few supreme words in which Milton replied to the mockers of his blindness—even these are worthily recast in the mould of English verse by the might and cunning of this workman's hand. Witness the original set against his version.
"Non est hæc via redeundi ad patriam, Pater mi; sed si alia per vos aut deinde per alios invenietur, quæ famæ Dantis atque honori non deroget, illam non lentis passibus acceptabo. Quod si per nullam talem Florentia introitur, nunquam Florentiam introibo. Quidni? nonne solis astrorumque specula ubique conspiciam? Nonne dulcissimas veritates potero speculari ubique sub cœlo, ni priùs inglorium, immo ignominiosum, populo Florentinæque civitati me reddam?—Quippe nec panis deficiet."
So wrote Dante in 1316; now partly rendered into English to this effect:—
