ay after
day, and have nothing to amuse us with at all?" Dante answered
bitterly:--"No, not strange; your Highness is to recollect the
Proverb, '_Like to Like_;'"--given the amuser, the amusee must also be
given! Such a man, with his proud silent ways, with his sarcasms and
sorrows, was not made to succeed at court. By degrees, it came to be
evident to him that he had no longer any resting-place, or hope of
benefit, in this earth. The earthly world had cast him forth, to
wander, wander; no living heart to love him now; for his sore miseries
there was no solace here.

The deeper naturally would the Eternal World impress itself on him;
that awful reality over which, after all, this Time-world, with its
Florences and banishments, only flutters as an unreal shadow. Florence
thou shalt never see: but Hell and Purgatory and Heaven thou shalt
surely see! What is Florence, Can della Scala, and the World and Life
altogether? ETERNITY: thither, of a truth, not elsewhither, art thou
and all things bound! The great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made
its home more and more in that awful other world. Naturally his
thoughts brooded on that, as on the one fact important for him. Bodied
or bodiless, it is the one fact important for all men:--but to Dante,
in that age, it was bodied in fixed certainty of scientific shape; he
no more doubted of that _Malebolge_ Pool, that it all lay there with
its gloomy circles, with its _alti guai_, and that he himself should
see it, than we doubt that we should see Constantinople if we went
thither. 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,' the most remarkable
of all modern Books, is the result.

It must have been a great solacement to Dante, and was, as we can see,
a proud thought for him at times, that he, here in exile, could do
this work; that no Florence, nor no man or men, could hinder him from
doing it, or even much help him in doing it. He knew too, partly, that
it was great; the greatest a man could 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 haven!" The labor 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 ye