uld do. 'If thou follow thy star,
_Se tu segui tua stella_,'--so could the Hero, in his forsakenness, in
his extreme need, still say to himself: 'Follow thou thy star, thou
shalt not fail of a glorious heaven!' The labour of writing, we find,
and indeed could know otherwise, was great and painful for him; he
says, This Book, 'which has made me lean for many years.' Ah yes, it
was won, all of it, with pain and sore toil,--not in sport, but in
grim earnest. His Book, as indeed most good Books are, has been
written, in many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his whole
history, this Book. He died after finishing it; not yet very old, at
the age of fifty-six;--broken-hearted rather, as is said. He lies
buried in his death-city Ravenna: _Hic claudor Dantes patriis extorris
ab oris_. The Florentines begged back his body, in a century after;
the Ravenna people would not give it. 'Here am I Dante laid, shut out
from my native shores.'

* * * * *

I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it 'a mystic
unfathomable Song'; and such is literally the character of it.
Coleridge remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a
sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words,
there is something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and
soul, word and idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song:
we said before, it was the Heroic of Speech! All _old_ Poems, Homer's
and the rest, are authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness,
that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not _sung_ is properly no
Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,--to the great
injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most
part! What we want to get at is the _thought_ the man had, if he had
any: why should he twist it into jingle, if he _could_ speak it out
plainly? It is only when the heart of him is rapt into true passion
of melody, and the very tones of him, according to Coleridge's remark,
become musical by the greatness, depth and music of his thoughts, that
we can give him right to rhyme and sing; that we call him a Poet, and
listen to him as the Heroic of Speakers,--whose speech _is_ Song.
Pretenders to this are many; and to an earnest reader, I doubt, it is
for most part a very melancholy, not to say an insupportable business,
that of reading rhyme! Rhyme that had no inward necessity to be
rhymed;--it ought to have told us plain