This letter secured him a second indictment, wherein it was provided that he should be burned alive if he set foot inside the republic.
This sentence was not revoked until Fourteen Hundred Ninety-four, and as Dante had then been dead more than a hundred years, it was of small avail on earth. The plan, however, of pardoning dead men was so that their souls could be gotten out of Purgatory legally, the idea being that man's law and justice were closely woven with the Law of God, and that God punished offenses against the State, just as He would offenses against the Church. Hence it was necessary for the State and Church to quash their indictment before God could do the same.
People who think that governments and religious denominations are divine institutions will see the consistency and necessity of Lorenzo de Medici and Pope Alexander the Fourth combining and issuing a pardon in Dante's favor one hundred seventy years after his death. He surely had been in Purgatory long enough.
Dante died at Ravenna in Thirteen Hundred Twenty-one, aged fifty-six years. It seems that he had gone there to see his daughter, Beatrice, who was in a nunnery just outside the city walls. There his dust rests.
If it be true that much of modern Christianity traces to Dante, it is no less true that he is the father of modern literature. He is the first writer of worth to emerge out of that night of darkness called the Middle Ages.
His language is tender and full of sweet, gentle imagery. He knew the value of symbols, and his words often cast a purple shadow. His style is pliable, flexible, fluid, and he shows rare skill in suggesting a thing that it would be absurd to describe.
Dante was an artist in words, and in imagination a master. The history of literature can never be written and the name of Dante left out. And he, of all writers, both ancient and modern, most vividly portrays the truth that without human love, there would be no such thing as poetry.