scribes it at the beginning of the "Inferno," in a
wild and savage wood. He was hindered from ascending the sunny hill of
heavenly aims by the speckled panther of sensuality, the gaunt, gray
wolf of avaricious selfishness, and the fierce lion of wrath and
ambitious pride. But he was restored to hope and effort by a vision of
Beatrice, which seems to have come to him before his Easter communion,
and fixed in his mind the purpose of writing about Beatrice--in her
ideal aspect of Divine Truth--"what never was writ of woman."

As a statesman, Dante, like most of the Florentines, was at this time
a Guelph, and an adherent of the papal party, though in later years he
became, by mature conviction, a Ghibelline, and placed his hopes for
Italy in the intervention of the emperor. The disputes between the
Guelphs and Ghibellines were complicated by the party factions of Neri
and Bianchi, and by the influence of Dante the leaders of both
factions were banished from the city, and among them his dearest
friend, Guido Cavalcanti. At this time Pope Boniface encouraged
Charles of Valois to enter Florence with an army. Dante resisted the
proposal, and was sent as an ambassador to Rome. During his absence a
decree of banishment was passed upon him. The Neri faction triumphed.
The house of Dante was sacked and burned. He never saw Florence more.

The news of his sentence reached him in Siena, in April, 1302, and
from that time began the last sad phases of his life, the long, slow
agony of his exile and bitter disappointment. Disillusioned, separated
from his wife, his children, the city of his love, he wandered from
city to city, disgusted with the baseness alike of Guelphs and
Ghibellines, feeling how salt is the bread of exile, and how hard it
is to climb another's stairs. "Alas," he says, "I have gone about like
a mendicant, showing against my will the wounds with which fortune
hath smitten me. I have indeed been a vessel without sail and without
rudder, carried to divers shores by the dry wind that springs from
poverty." In 1316 he did indeed receive from ungrateful Florence an
offer of return, but on the unworthy conditions that he should pay a
fine and publicly acknowledge his criminality. He scorned such
recompense of his innocence after having suffered exile for well-nigh
three lustres. "If," he wrote, "by no honorable way can entrance be
found into Florence, there will I never enter. What? Can I not from
every corner of the earth