Verso di te, che fai tanto sottili
Provvedimenti, che a mezzo novembre
Non giunge quel che tu d'ottobre fili.'
"They are nothing but a song in our ears. And yet we may comfort ourselves. For I believe that the world has always been the same and has always contained an equal mass of good and evil, but I believe also that this good and evil passes from one country to another, as we may see by the records of these kingdoms of antiquity, which, as their manners changed, passed from one to the other, but the world itself remained the same. There is only this difference, that whereas first the seat of the world's greatness was at Assyria, whence it passed to the Medes, thence into Persia, until finally it came to Rome and Italy, and though no other Empire has followed which has proved lasting, yet now the greatness of the world is diffused through many nations, in which men live in orderly and civil fashion. Everything is subject to change and the vicissitudes of fortune; but passing from change to change all things return more or less to their former state."
"I remember the lines. Tell me, Messer: Dante calleth Virgil his master; do you think the poetry of Dante similar and equal to Virgil?"
Machiavelli moved a little in his chair.
"There is a Virgil by your hand, Messer," he said. "Open it. Look at the print and paper; it was printed at Venice. So I like to read that splendid verse. And yet Dante scarcely seems a poet to be read in print. I should like to possess his works written in a fine, neat, clerkly script, upon vellum, with little illuminations in the margin, angels in vermilion and ultramarine upon a golden ground; initial letters with quaint floral devices woven about them, heraldic monsters, the Gryphon with his car, Beatrice walking by the stream in the earthly Paradise. He chose Virgil as his master because, to him, Virgil was the sole Roman to whom the prophecy of Christ's coming had been revealed by the divine will; because Virgil himself had pictured the state of man after death; and, finally, because Virgil had been the singer of that Empire which Dante so greatly reverenced. The poetry of Dante has nothing of classical proportion; its unity is simply the unity of a philosophical system; its progress is like a pageant. But it is full of a sudden wilful beauty, a delight in natural things, moments of birdlike music when he speaks of birds, as in the lines:
"'Nell'ora che comincie i tristi lai
La rondinella presso alla mattina,
Forse a memoria de' suoi primi guai.'