no one can afford to pass over in his search for
the burning words that keep alive the thought of other ages. Very
different in theme and manner is the poetry of Horace. He is the most
modern of all the men of old, far more modern than our own Puritan
ancestors. His mixture of grace and shrewdness, poetic charm and worldly
wisdom, we find nowhere else. The bulk of his work is not large, and
this fact, as in the case of Gray and Keats and Poe, is rather in his
favor, because the reader can easily become familiar with it all, though
then he will sigh for more. Horace wears well; the older we grow the
better we like him. He has love songs for youth, political poems for
maturity, and satires for old age. After we have lived with him for half
a century he becomes more real to us than most of our acquaintances in
the flesh. Roman literature is not without other great names to attract
the student; but these two must not be overlooked by the most general or
the most selective reader.

With Vergil the world always associates the still greater figure of one
who was proud to call him master--that of Dante. More than is true of
almost any other writer, his work is a compendium of the life of his
time. The "Divine Comedy" is first of all poetry, and poetry of the
loftiest order; but it is also an embodiment of the learning, the
philosophy, and the theology of his age. It mirrors at once the
greatness and the limitations of the medieval mind. Dante is not modern
in the sense that Horace is, though he is thrice as near to us in time.
Leigh Hunt said that his great poem ought to be called an infernal
tragedy; but that is true only of the Inferno; the spiritual atmosphere
clears as we follow his footsteps through the Purgatorio and the
Paradiso. Of all the masterpieces of human genius the "Divine Comedy" is
perhaps the one that asks the most self-surrender of the modern reader
and--shall I add?--that repays it most richly. Longfellow's marvelous
sonnet sequence, written while he was translating Dante, portrays at
once the spirit in which we should approach the reading of the "Divine
Comedy" and the wonders that we shall find there. It is a book that we
never can outgrow. To know it is to be made a citizen of the moral
universe.

In 1616, within ten days of each other, there passed from earth two men,
each the writer first thought of when his country's literature is
mentioned, and one of them the first writer in the world's literature.