[DANTE ALIGHIERI]
ITALY. 1265-1321.
——"'Tis the doom
Of spirits of my order to be rack'd
In life; to wear their hearts out, and consume
Their days in endless strife, and die alone:
—Then future thousands crowd around their tomb,
And pilgrims come from climes where they have known
The name of Him,—who now is but a name;
And wasting homage o'er the sullen stone,
Spread his, by him unheard, unheeded, fame."
LORD BYRON's Prophecy of Dante, Canto I.
Among the illustrious fathers of song who, in their own land, cannot cease to exercise dominion over the minds, characters, and destinies of all posterity,—and who, beyond its frontiers, must continue to influence the taste, and help to form the genius, of those who shall exercise like authority in other countries,—Dante Alighieri is, undoubtedly, one of the most remarkable.
This poet was descended from a very ancient stock, which, according to Boccaccio, traced its lineage to the Roman house of Frangipani,—one of whose members, surnamed Eliseo, was said to have been an early settler, if not a principal founder, of the restored city of Florence, in the reign of Charlemagne, after it had lain desolate for several centuries, subsequently to its destruction by Attila the Hun. From this Eliseo sprang a family, of which Dante gives, in the fifteenth and sixteenth cantos of his "Paradiso," such information, as he thought proper; making Cacciaguida (one of its most distinguished chiefs, who fell fighting in the crusade under the emperor Conrad III.,) say, rather ambiguously, of those who went before him, that "who they were, and whence they came, it is more honest to keep silence than to tell,"—probably, however, intending no more than to disclaim vain boasting, but not by any means to disparage his progenitors, for whom, in the fifteenth canto of the "Inferno," he seems to claim the glory of having been of Roman descent, and fathers of Florence. Cacciaguida, having married a noble lady of Ferrara, gave to one of his sons by her the name of Aldighieri (afterwards softened to Alighieri), in honour of his consort. This Alighieri was the grandfather of Dante; and concerning him, Cacciaguida, in the last-mentioned canto, informs the poet, that, for some unnamed offence, his spirit has been more than a hundred years pacing round the first circle of the mountain of purgatory; adding,—
"Ben si convien, che la lunga fatica
Tu gli raccorci con l' opere tue."
"And well it would be, were his long fatigue
Shorten'd by thy good deeds."
Dante was born in the spring of the year 1265. Benvenuta da Immola calls his father a lawyer; but little more is recorded of him except that he was twice married, and left two sons and a daughter, at an early age, to the guardianship of relatives. Dante (abridged from Durante) was born of Bella, his father's second wife, of whom, during her pregnancy, Boccaccio relates a very significant dream,—on what authority he does not say, and with what truth the reader may judge for himself. She imagined herself sitting under the shade of a lofty laurel, in the midst of a green meadow, by the side of a brilliant fountain. Here she was delivered of a boy, who, in as little time as might easily happen in a dream, grew up into a man before her eyes, by feeding upon the berries that fell from the tree, and drinking of the pure stream which watered its roots. Presently he had become a shepherd; but, climbing too eagerly up the stem to gather some leaves from the laurel, with the fruit of which he had been hitherto nourished, he fell headlong to the ground, and on rising appeared no longer a man, but a magnificent peacock. It would be aggravating the offence of wasting time by quoting such a fable, were we to give the obvious interpretation. This, however, the great Boccaccio has done with most magniloquent gravity,—a task for which, of all men, he was no doubt the most competent, as it is probable that no soul living (the lady herself not excepted) besides himself was in the secret either of the vision or the moral. One point of the latter, which could not easily be guessed, may be mentioned; namely, that the spots on the peacock's tail (the hundred eyes of Argus) foreshowed the hundred cantos of the "Divina Commedia." The ingenious author of the Decameron may have borrowed the idea of this dream from Dante's own allusion to the laurel and its leaves,—the meed of poets and of princes,—in his preposterous invocation of Apollo at the commencement of the "Paradiso."
Dante himself never alludes to this notable omen, though often referring, with conscious pride, to his genius, and the circumstances by which it had been awakened and exercised. This he attributed to the benign influence of the constellation Gemini, which ruled at his nativity. In the "Paradiso," Canto XXII., mentioning his flight from the planetary system to the eighth sphere, where the fixed stars have their dwelling, he exclaims,—