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 neighbours,--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 answers, with
fixed stern pride: 'If I cannot return without calling myself guilty,
I will never return, _nunquam revertar_.'

For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patron
to patron, from place to place; proving, in his own bitter words, 'How
hard is the path, _Come e duro calle_.' The wretched are not cheerful
company. Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with
his moody humours, was not a man to conciliate men. Petrarch reports
of him that being at Can