My first studies of the great poet are in the time long past, antedating even that middle term of life which was for him the starting-point of a new inspiration. Yet it seems to me that no part of my life, since that reading, has been without some echo of the "Divine Comedy" in my mind. In the walk through Hell, I strangely believe. Its warnings still admonish me. I see the boat of Charon, with its mournful freight. I pass before the judgment seat of Midas. I see the souls tormented in hopeless flame. I feel the weight of the leaden cloaks. I shrink from the jar of the flying rocks, hurled as weapons. For me, dark Ugolino still feeds upon his enemy. Francesca still mates with her sad lover.
From this hopeless abyss, I emerge to the kindlier pain of Purgatory, whose end is almost Heaven. And of that blessed realm, my soul still holds remembrance—of its solemn joy, of its unfolding revelation. The vision of that mighty cross in which all the stars of the highest heaven range themselves is before me, on each fair cluster the word "Cristo" outshining all besides.
Among my dearest recollections is that of an Easter sermon devised by me for an ignorant black congregation in a far-off West Indian isle, in which I told of this vision of the cross, and tried to make it present to them. But this grateful remembrance which I have carried through so many years does not regard the poet alone. In the world's great goods, as in its great evils, a woman has her part. And this poem, which has been such a boon to humanity, has for its central inspiration the memory of a woman.
In the prologue, already we hear of her. It is she who sends her poet his poet-guide. When he shrinks from the painful progress which lies before him, and deems the companionship even of Virgil an insufficient pledge of safety, the words of his lady, repeated to him by his guide, restore his sinking courage, and give him strength for his immortal journey.
Here are those words of Beatrice, spoken to Virgil, and by him brought to Dante:—
| O courteous shade of Mantua! thou whose fame |
| Yet lives and shall live long as Nature lasts! |
| A friend, not of my fortune, but myself, |
| On the wide desert in his road has met |
| Hindrance so great that he through fear has turned. |
| Assist him: so to me will comfort spring. |
| I who now bid thee on this errand forth |
| Am Beatrice. |
Who and what was Beatrice, whose message gave Dante strength to explore the fearful depths of evil and its punishment? This we may learn elsewhere.
Dante, passionate poet in his youth, has left to posterity a work unique of its sort,—the romance of a childish love which grew with the growth of the lover. In his adolescence, its intensity at times overpowers his bodily senses. The years that built up his towering manhood built up along with it this ideal womanhood, which, whether realized or realizable, or neither, was the highest and holiest essence which his imagination could infuse into a human form. The sweet shyness of that first peep at the Beautiful, of that first thrill of the master chord of being, is rendered immortal for us by the candor of this great master. We can see the shamefaced boy, taken captive by the dazzling vision of Beatrice, veiling the features of his unreasonable passion, and retiring to his own closet, there to hide his joy at having found on earth a thing so beautiful.
Dante's love for Beatrice dates from the completion of his own ninth year, and the beginning of hers. He first sees her at a May party, at the house of her father, Folco Polinari. Her apparel, he says, "was of a most noble tincture, a subdued and becoming crimson; and she wore a girdle and ornaments becoming her childish years." At the sight of her, his heart began to beat with painful violence. A master thought had taken possession of him, and that master's name was well known to him, as how should it not have been in that day when, if ever in this world, Love was crowned lord of all? Urged by this tyrant, from time to time, to go in search of Beatrice, he beheld in her, he says, a demeanor so praiseworthy and so noble as to remind him of a line of Homer, regarding Helen of Troy:—
"From heaven she had her birth, and not from mortal clay."