time in concert with the expelled party, when
they attempted to force their way back to Florence; he gave them up at
last in scorn and despair; but he never returned to Florence. And he
found no new home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his
exile to his death, he was a wanderer. The character is stamped on his
writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or dim, do but
disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and there, we are
not told how or why. One old record, discovered by antiquarian industry,
shows him in a village church near Florence, planning with the Cerchi
and the White party an attack on the Black Guelfs. In another, he
appears in the Val di Magra, making peace between its small potentates;
in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The
traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with
a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the
recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy
form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the
Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he
passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumor brings him to the
West--with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little
that is certain can be made out about the places where he was honored
and admired, and, it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find
him sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the lords of
Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel, built, not
by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, "that mother of little love,"
asked for his bones, but rightly asked in vain. His place of repose is
better in those remote and forsaken streets "by the shore of the Adrian
Sea," hard by the last relics of the Roman Empire--the mausoleum of the
children of Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian--than among the
assembled dead of St. Croce, or amid the magnificence of Santa Maria del
Fiore.

The _Commedia_, at the first glance, shows the traces of its author's
life. It is the work of a wanderer. The very form in which it is cast is
that of a journey, difficult, toilsome, perilous, and full of change. It
is more than a working out of that touching phraseology of the Middle
Ages in which "the way" was the technical theological expression for
this mortal life; and "viator" meant man in his state of trial, as
"comprehensor" me