tried hard to recover it, even 'with arms in his hand,' but
could not, and was doomed, 'whenever caught, to be burned alive'; invited
to confess his guilt and return, he sternly answered: 'If I cannot return
without calling myself guilty, I will never return.'" From this moment he
was without home in this world; and "the great soul of Dante, homeless on
earth, made its home more and more in that awful other world ... over
which, this time-world, with its Florences and banishments, flutters as
an unreal shadow." Dante's heart, long filled with this, brooding over it
in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into "mystic
unfathomable song," and this, his "DIVINE COMEDY" (q. v.), the
most remarkable of all modern Books, is the result. He died after
finishing it, not yet very old, at the age of 56. He lies buried in his
death-city Ravenna, "shutout from my native shores." The Florentines
begged back his body in a century after; the Ravenna people would not
give it (1265-1321). See CARLYLE'S "HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP," and
Dean Plumptre's "LIFE OF DANTE."

DANTON, GEORGES JACQUES, "The Titan of the Forlorn Hope" of the
French Revolution, born at Arcis-sur-Aube, "of good farmer people ... a
huge, brawny, black-browed man, with a waste energy as of a Hercules"; an
advocate by profession, "esurient, but with nothing to do; found Paris
and his country in revolt, rose to the front of the strife; resolved to
do or die"; the cause threatened, he threw himself again and again into
the breach defiant, his motto "to dare, and to dare, and again to dare,"
so as to put and keep the enemy in fear; "Let my name be blighted," he
said, "what am I? The cause alone is great, and will live and not
perish"; but the "SEA-GREEN" (q. v.) viewed him with jealousy,
held him suspect, had him arrested, brought before the Revolutionary
Tribunal, the severity of whose proceedings under him he had condemned,
and sentenced to the guillotine; a reflection of his in prison has been
recorded: "Oh, it were better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with
governing of men." "No weakness, Danton," he said to himself on the
scaffold, as his heart began to sink within him as he thought of his
wife. His last words were to Samson the headsman: "Thou wilt show my head
to the people, it is worth showing"; words worthy of the brother of
Mirabeau, who died saying, "I wish I could leave my head behind me,
France needs it just now"; a man fiery-real, as has