love, his mind soared to such exalted regions of
adoration, that when she passed away he saw her only in the beatified
state, in company with saints and angels; and he was wrapped in
ecstasies which knew no end,--the unbroken adoration of beauty, grace,
and truth, even of those eternal ideas on which Plato based all that is
certain, and all that is worth living for; that sublime realism without
which life is a failure, and this world is "a mockery, a delusion, and
a snare."

This is the history and exposition of that love for Beatrice with which
the whole spiritual life of Dante is identified, and without which the
"Divine Comedy" might not have been written. I may have given to it
disproportionate attention; and it is true I might have allegorized it,
and for love of a woman I might have substituted love for an art,--even
the art of poetry, in which his soul doubtless lived, even as Michael
Angelo, his greatest fellow-countryman, lived in the adoration of
beauty, grace, and majesty. Oh, happy and favored is the person who
lives in the enjoyment of an art! It may be humble; it may be grand. It
may be music; it may be painting, or sculpture, or architecture, or
poetry, or oratory, or landscape gardening, yea, even farming, or
needle-work, or house decoration,--anything which employs the higher
faculties of the mind, and brings order out of confusion, and takes one
from himself, from the drudgery of mechanical labors, even if it be no
higher than carving a mantelpiece or making a savory dish; for all these
things imply creation, alike the test and the reward of genius itself,
which almost every human being possesses, in some form or other, to a
greater or less degree,--one of the kindest gifts of Deity to man.

The great artist, kindled by his visions of imperishable loveliness in
the person of his departed Beatrice, now resolves to dedicate to her
honor his great life-labor,--even his immortal poem, which should be a
transcript of his thoughts, a mirror of his life, a record of his
sorrows, a painting of his experiences, a description of what he saw, a
digest of his great meditations, a thesaurus of the treasures of the
Mediaeval age, an exposition of its great and leading ideas in
philosophy and in religion. Every great man wishes to leave behind some
monument of his labors, to bless or instruct mankind. Any man without
some form of this noble ambition lives in vain, even if his monument be
no more than a cultivated f