Among My Books. Second Series

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Second Series
by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
To R.W. EMERSON.
A love and honor which more than thirty years have deepened, though priceless to him they enrich, are of little import to one capable of inspiring them. Yet I cannot deny myself the pleasure of so far intruding on your reserve as at least to make public acknowledgment of the debt I can never repay.
On the banks of a little river so shrunken by the suns of summer that it seems fast passing into a tradition, but swollen by the autumnal rains with an Italian suddenness of passion till the massy bridge shudders under the impatient heap of waters behind it, stands a city which, in its period of bloom not so large as Boston, may well rank next to Athens in the history which teaches come l' uom s' eterna .
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita ;
Colonna, Orsini, e Frangipani, Prendono oggi e pagano domani.
Of which this rude paraphrase may serve as a translation:—
If these be not the words of Dante, what is internal evidence worth? The indomitably self-reliant man, loyal first of all to his most unpopular convictions (his very host, Guido, being a Guelph), puts his Ghibellinism ( jura monarchiae ) in the front. The man whose whole life, like that of selected souls always, had been a war fare, calls heaven another camp,—a better one, thank God! The wanderer of so many years speaks of his soul as a guest,—glad to be gone, doubtless. The exile, whose sharpest reproaches of Florence are always those of an outraged lover, finds it bitter that even his unconscious bones should lie in alien soil.
Looked at outwardly, the life of Dante seems to have been an utter and disastrous failure. What its inward satisfactions must have been, we, with the Paradiso open before us, can form some faint conception. To him, longing with an intensity which only the word Dantesque will express to realize an ideal upon earth, and continually baffled and misunderstood, the far greater part of his mature life must have been labor and sorrow. We can see how essential all that sad experience was to him, can understand why all the fairy stories hide the luck in the ugly black casket; but to him, then and there, how seemed it?