y Beatrice
Portinari, whom he first saw when he was nine years old and
Beatrice eight. His whole future life and work are believed
to have been determined by this ideal attachment. But an
equally noteworthy fact of his literary career is that his
works were produced in the midst of party strifes wherein
the poet himself was a prominent actor. In the bitter feuds
of the Guelfs and Ghibellines he bore the sufferings of
failure, persecution, and exile. But above all these trials
rose his heroic spirit and the sublime voice of his poems,
which became a quickening prophecy, realized in the birth of
Italian and of European literature, in the whole movement of
the Renaissance, and in the ever-advancing development of
the modern world.

Church's clear-sighted interpretations of the mind and life
of Dante, and of the history-making _Commedia_, attest the
importance of including the poet and his work in this record
of Great Events.

The _Divina Commedia_ is one of the landmarks of history. More than a
magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening
of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art and the glory of
a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the
mind's power which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up
ineffaceably and forever as time goes on marking out its advance by
grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the
consent of all who come after. It stands with the _Iliad_ and
Shakespeare's plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the
_Novum Organon_ and the _Principia_, with Justinian's Code, with the
Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens
European literature, as the _Iliad_ did that of Greece and Rome. And,
like the _Iliad_, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in
undiminished freshness the literature which it began.

We approach the history of such works, in which genius seems to have
pushed its achievements to a new limit. Their bursting out from nothing,
and gradual evolution into substance and shape, cast on the mind a
solemn influence. They come too near the fount of being to be followed
up without our feeling the shadows which surround it. We cannot but
fear, cannot but feel ourselves cut off from this visible and familiar
world--as we enter into the cloud. And as with the processes of nature,
so it is with those offsprings of man