on

To discourse of Dante, concerning whom, ever since Boccaccio lectured the the "Divina Commedia” in Duomo of Florence, more than five hundred years ago, there has been an unbroken procession of loving commentators, must always be a difficult undertaking; and the difficulty is increased when the audience addressed, as I believe is the case this evening, is composed, for the most part, of serious students of the austere Florentine. The only claim I can have on your attention is that I am, in that respect at least, in a more or less degree, one of yourselves. It is now close on forty years since, in Rome as Rome then was, one repaired, day after day, to the Baths of Cavacalla, not, as now, denuded of the sylvan growth of successive centuries, but cloaked, from shattered base to ruined summit, in tangled greenery, and in the silent sunshine of an Imperial Past, surrendered oneself to

"quella fonte Che spande di parlar si largo fiume," that unfailing stream of spacious speech which Dante, you remember, ascribes to Virgil, which Dante equally shares with him, and to each alike of whom one can sincerely say:

Read before the Dante Society on June 13th.

"Vagliami il lungo studio e il grande

amore,

Che m' han fatto cercar lo tuo volume."

But love and study of Dante will not of themselves suffice to make discourse concerning him interesting or adequate; and I am deeply impressed with the disadvantages under which I labor this evening. But my task has been made even exceptionally perilous, since it has been preceded by the entrancing influence of music, and music that borrowed an added charm from the melodious words of the poet himself. May it not be with you as it was with him when the musician Casella-"Casella mio"-acceded to his request in the Purgatorial Realm, and sang to him, he says,

"si dolcemente, Che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona."

sang to him so sweetly that the sweetness of it still sounded in his ears; words that strangely recall the couplet in Wordsworth, though I scarcely think Wordsworth was a Dante scholar:

"The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more."

Many of you remember, I am sure, the entire passage in the second canto

of the "Purgatorio." But, since there may be some who have forgotten itand the best passages in the "Divina Commedia" can never be recalled too often-and since, moreover, it will serve as a fitting introduction to the theme on which I propose for a brief while to descant this evening, let me Comrecall it to your remembrance. panioned by Virgil, and newly arrived on the shores of Purgatory, Dante perceives a barque approaching, so swift and light that it causes no ripple on the water, driven and steered only by the wings of an Angel of the Lord, and carrying a hundred disembodied spirits, singing "In exitu Israel de Egypto." As they disembark, one of them recognizes Dante, and stretches out his arms to embrace the Poet. The passage is too beautiful to be shorn of its loveliness either by curtailment or by mere translation:

strove to fold her in one farewell embrace.

"Ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum,

Ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago."

Similarly, the incorporeal figure in the "Divine Comedy" bids Dante desist from the attempt to embrace him, since it is useless; and then Dante discerns it is that of Casella, who used oftentimes in Florence to sing to him, and now assures the poet that, as he loved him upon earth, so here he loves him still. Encouraged by the tender words, Dante calls him "Casella mio," and addresses to him the following bequest:

". . . Se nuova legge non ti toglie
Memoria o uso all' amoroso canto,
Che mi solea quetar tutte mie voglie,
Di cio ti piaccia consolare alquanto
L'anima mia, che, con la sua persona
Venendo qui, è affannata tanto."
"If by new dispensation not deprived
Of the remembrance of beloved song
Wherewith you used to soothe my

restlessness,

I pray you now a little while assuage My spirit, which, since burdened with the body

In journeying here, is wearied utterly."

Quickly comes the melodious response:

"Amor che nella mente mi ragonia,' Comminciò egli allor si dolcemente, Che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona Lo mio Maestro, ed io, e quella gente Ch'eran con lui, perevan si contenti, Com' а nessun tocasse altro la mente."

"Love that holds high discourse within my mind,'

With such sweet tenderness he thus began

That still the sweetness lingers in my ear,

Virgil, and I, and that uncarnal group That with him were, so captivated seemed,

That in our hearts was room for nought beside."

Not so, however, the angelic guide of the spirits newly arrived in Purgatory. Seeing them "fissi ed attendi alle sue note," enthralled by Casella's singing, he begins to rate them soundly as "spiriti lenti," lazy, loitering spirits, asks them what they mean by thus halting on the way, and bids them hasten to the spot where they will be gradually purged of their earthly offences, and be admitted to the face of God. The canto closes with the following exquisite lines:

"Come quando, cogliendo biada 0 loglio,

Gli colombi adunati alla pastura, Queti, senza mostrar l'usato orgoglio, Se cosa appare ond elli abbian paura Subitamente lasciano star l'esca, Perchè assaliti son da maggior cura; Cosi vid'io quella masnada fresca

Lasciar il canto e fuggir ver la costa, Com uom che va nè sa dove riesca."

"As when a flight of doves, in quest of food,

Have settled on a field of wheat or tares,

And there still feed in silent quietude, If by some apparition that they dread Asudden scared, forthway desert the meal,

Since by mere strong anxiety assailed, So saw I that new-landed company Forsake the song and seek the mountain side,

Like one who flees, but flies he knows not whither."

Now, if we consider this episode in its integrity, do we not find ourselves, from first to last, essentially in the region of the Ideal? Whether you believe in the existence of a local habitation named Purgatory, or you do not, none of us, not even Dante himself, has seen it, save with the mind's eye. It was said of his austere countenance by his contemporaries that it was the face of the man who had seen Hell. But the phrase, after all, was figurative, and not even the divine poet had,

with the bodily vision, seen what Virgil, in one of the most pathetic of his lines, calls the further shore. Moreover, for awhile, and in what may be termed the exordium of the episode, Dante surrenders himself wholly to this Ideal, and treats it idealistically. First he discerns only two wings of pure white light, which, when he has grown more accustomed to their brightness, he perceives to be the Angel of the Lord, the steersman of the purgatorial bark:

"Vedi che sdegna gli argomenti umani, Si che remo non vuol, nè altro velo Che l'ale sue, tra liti si lontani

*

Trattando l'aere con l'eterne penne"

lines that for ethereal beauty, are, I think, unmatched; and I will not presume to render them into verse. But what they say is that the Angel had no need of mortal expedients, of sail, or oar, or anything beside, save his own wings, that fanned the air with their eternal breath. The bark, thus driven and thus steered, is equally unsubstantial and ideal, for it makes no ripple in the wave through which it glides. But at length-not, you may be quite sure, of purpose prepense, but guided by that unerring instinct which is the great poet's supreme giftDante gradually passes from idealistic and realistic treatment of the episode, thereby compelling you, by what Shakespeare, in "The Tempest," through the mouth of Prospero, calls "my so potent art," to believe implicitly in its occurrence, even if your incapacity to linger too long in the rarefied atmosphere of the Ideal have begun to render you incredulous concerning it. For all at once he introduces Casella, Florence, his own past cares and labors there, the weariness of the spirit that comes over all of us, even from our very spiritual efforts, and the soothing power of tender

music. Then, with a passing touch of happy egotism, which has such a charm for us in poets that are dead, but which, I am told, is resented, though perhaps not by the gracious or the wise, in living ones, Dante enforces our belief by representing Casella as forthwith chanting a line of the poet's own that occurs in a canzone of the "Convito":—

"Amor che nella mente mi ragiona."

"Love that holds high discourse within my mind."

For a moment we seem to be again transported into the pure realm of the Ideal, as not Dante and Virgil alone, but the souls just landed on the shores of Purgatory, are described as being so enthralled by the song-tutti fissi ed attenti-that they can think of and heed nothing else. But quickly comes another realistic touch in the reproof to the spell-bound spirits not there to loiter listening to the strain, but to hurry forward to their destined bourne. Finally, as if to confirm the impression of absolute reality, while not removing us from the world, or withdrawing from us the charm, of the Ideal, the poet ends with the ex quisite but familiar simile of the startled doves already recited to you.

What is the impression left, what the result produced, by the entire canto? Surely it is that the poet's imagination, operating through the poet's realistic treatment of the Ideal, and his idealistic treatment of the Real, has taken us all captive, so that we feel nothing of the Increduius odi disposition, the unwillingness to believe, and the mental antipathy engendered by that unwillingness, so tersely and so truly described by Horace, but yield credence wholly and absolutely to the existence of a place called Purgatory, with its circles, its denizens, its hopes, its aspirations,

and purifying power. But, read where you will in the pages of the "Divina Commedia," you will find this is one of the main causes of its permanent hold on the attention of the world. Its theology may to many seem open to question, to some obsolete and out of date; its astronomy necessarily labors under the disadvantage of having been prior to the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, not to speak of the great astronomers of later date, including our own times; and its erudition, weighty and wonderful as it is, can occasionally be shown by more recent and more advantageously circumstanced scholarship to be faulty and inaccurate. But so long as these are presented to us nimbused by the wizard light that fuses the Real and the Ideal, we believe while we read and listen, and that is enough. The very first line of "Divina Commedia," so familiar to everyone, though it is to introduce us to the horrors of the Inferno, is so realistic, so within the range of the experience of all who have reached the meridian of life or even looked on that period in others, that we are at one predisposed to yield our imagination passively to what follows. But I must allow that the passage which does immediately follow, and which discourses of the panther, the lion, and the wolf, is so symbolic, and has lent itself to so many suggestions and interpretations, that, had the poem generally been conceived and composed in that fashion, it would not only have fallen short of immortality, it would long since have been buried in the pool of Lethe, which is the predestined resting-place of all untempered and unredeemed symbolism in verse. I smile, and I have no doubt you will smile also, when I say that I too have my own interpretation of the inner meaning of those three menacing beasts. But, be assured, I have not the smallest in