, 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 yes, it was won, all of it,
with pain and sore toil,--not in sport, but in grim earnest. His Book,
as indeed most good Books are, has been written, in many senses, with
his heart's blood. It is his whole history, this Book. He died after
finishing it; not yet very old, at the age of fifty-six;--broken-hearted
rather, as is said. He lies buried in his death-city Ravenna: _Hic
claudor Dantes patriis extorris ab oris_. The Florentines begged back
his body, in a century after; the Ravenna people would not give it.
"Here am I Dante laid, shut out from my native shores."

I said, Dante's Poem was a Song: it is Tieck who calls it "a mystic
unfathomable Song;" and such is literally the character of it. Coleridge
remarks very pertinently somewhere, that wherever you find a sentence
musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is
something deep and good in the meaning too. For body and soul, word and
idea, go strangely together here as everywhere. Song: we said before,
it was the Heroic of Speech! All _old_ Poems, Homer's and the rest, are
authentically Songs. I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems
are; that whatsoever is not _sung_ is properly no Poem, but a piece of
Prose cramped into jingling lines,--to the great injury of the grammar,
to the great grief of the reader, for most part! What we wants to get at
is the _thought_ the man had, if he had any: why should he twist it into
jingle, if he _could_ speak it out plainly? It is only when the heart
of him is rapt into true passion of melody, and the very tones of him,
according to Coleridge's remark, become musical by the greatness, depth
and music of his thoughts, that we can give him right to rhyme and
sing; that we call him a Poet, and listen to him as the Heroic of
Speakers,--whose speech is Song. Pretenders to this are many; and to an
earnest reader, I doubt, it is for most part a very melancholy, not to
say an insupportable business, that of reading rhyme! Rhyme that had
no inward necessity to be rhymed;--it ought to have told us pla