h his whole
strength of affection loved. She died: Dante himself was wedded; but it
seems not happily, far from happily. I fancy, the rigorous earnest man,
with his keen excitabilities, was not altogether easy to make happy.

We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him as
he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podesta, or whatsoever they
call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbors,--and the world had
wanted one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence
would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries
continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there
will be ten of them and more) had no _Divina Commedia_ to hear! We will
complain of nothing. A nobler destiny was appointed for this Dante; and
he, struggling like a man led towards death and crucifixion, could not
help fulfilling it. Give _him_ the choice of his happiness! He knew not,
more than we do, what was really happy, what was really miserable.

In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some other
confused disturbances rose to such a height, that Dante, whose party had
seemed the stronger, was with his friends cast unexpectedly forth into
banishment; doomed thenceforth to a life of woe and wandering. His
property was all confiscated and more; he had the fiercest feeling that
it was entirely unjust, nefarious in the sight of God and man. He tried
what was in him to get reinstated; tried even by warlike surprisal, with
arms in his hand: but it would not do; bad only had become worse. There
is a record, I believe, still extant in the Florence Archives, dooming
this Dante, wheresoever caught, to be burnt alive. Burnt alive; so
it stands, they say: a very curious civic document. Another curious
document, some considerable number of years later, is a Letter of
Dante's to the Florentine Magistrates, written in answer to a milder
proposal of theirs, that he should return on condition of apologizing
and paying a fine. He answers, with fixed stern pride: "If I cannot
return without calling myself guilty, I will never return, _nunquam
revertar_."

For Dante there was now no home in this world. He wandered from patron
to patron, from place to place; proving, in his own bitter words, "How
hard is the path, _Come e duro calle_." The wretched are not cheerful
company. Dante, poor and banished, with his proud earnest nature, with
his moody humors, was not a man to concil