Some of the world's great books are noteworthy for the profound influence that they have exerted, not only over the contemporaries of the writers, but over many succeeding generations. Some there are which seem to have in them a perennial stimulus to all that is best in human nature; to stretch hands across the gulf of the centuries and to give to people today the flaming zeal, the unquestioning religious faith, the love of beauty and of truth that inspired their authors hundreds of years ago. Among the small number of these transcendently great books stands Dante's Divine Comedy, one of the greatest poems of all ages and one of the tremendous spiritual forces that has colored and shaped and actually transformed many lives.

History is full of examples of the vital influence of Dante's great work only a few years after it was given to the world. Then came a long period of neglect, and it was only with the opening of the nineteenth century that Dante came fairly into his own. The last century saw a great welling up of enthusiasm over this poet and his work. The Divine Comedy became the manual of Mazzini and Manzoni and the other leaders of New Italy, and its influence spread over all Europe, as well as throughout this country. Preachers of all creeds, scholars, poets, all acclaimed this great religious epic as one of the chief books of all the ages. In it they found inspiration and stimulus to the spiritual life. Their testimony to its deathless force would fill a volume.

Yet in taking up the Divine Comedy the reader who does not know Italian is confronted with the same difficulty as in reading the Greek or Latin poets without knowledge of the two classical languages. He must be prepared to get only a dim appreciation of the beauties of the original, because Dante is essentially Italian, and the form in which his verse is cast cannot be reproduced in English without great loss. On this subject of translating poetry George E. Woodberry, one of the ablest of American literary critics, says:

"To read a great poet in a translation is like seeing the sun through smoked glass. * * * To understand a canzone of Dante or Leopardi one must feel as an Italian feels; to appreciate its form he must know the music of the form as only the Italian language can hold and eternize it. Translation is impotent to overcome either of these difficulties."

This is the scholar's estimate; yet Emerson, who saw as clearly as any man of his time and who grasped the essentials of all the great books, favored translations and declared he got great good from them. At any rate, the average reader has no time to learn Italian in order to appreciate Dante. The best he can do is to read a good translation and then help out his own impressions by the comment and appreciation of such lovers of the great poet as Ruskin, Carlyle, Lowell and Longfellow. The best translation is Cary's version, which was revised and brought out in its present form in 1844, just before the translator's death. It is written in blank verse, easy and melodious.

To understand even an outline of the Divine Comedy one must know a few facts about the life of Dante and the experiences that matured his mind and found expression in this great poem. Dante was born in Florence in 1265, of a good Italian family, but reduced to poverty. At eighteen he wrote his first poems, which were recognized by Cavalcanti, the foremost Italian poet of his day. He became a soldier and he was involved in the petty wars between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. In 1290 Beatrice, the woman whom he adored and who served as the inspiration of all his poetry, died, and soon after he gathered under the title Vita Nuova, or New Life, the prose narrative, studded with lyrics, which is one of the great love songs of all ages. This is the highest essence of romantic love, a love so sublimated that it never seeks physical gratification. Praise of his lady, contemplation of her angelic beauty of face and loveliness of mind and character—these are the forms in which Dante's love finds its exquisite expression. And this same love and adoration of Beatrice will be found the chief inspiration of the Divine Comedy.

For ten years after the death of Beatrice Dante was immersed in political conflicts. He took a prominent part in the government of Florence, but in 1302 he was sentenced with fifteen other citizens of that city to be burned alive should he at any time come within the confines of Florence. For three years the poet hoped to succeed in regaining his power in Florence, but when these hopes finally failed he turned to the expression of his spiritual conquests, to let the world know how the love of one woman and the desire to "keep vigil for the good of the world" could transform a man's soul. So in poverty and distress, wandering from one Italian city to another, Dante wrote most of his great epic. His final years were spent in Ravenna, where many friends and disciples gathered about him. The Divine Comedy was completed only a short time before Dante's death, which occurred on September 14, 1321.

This great poem waited nearly six hundred years before its merits were fully appreciated. In form it was drawn directly from the sixth book of Virgil's Æneid, and to make this likeness all the stronger Dante makes Virgil his guide on the imaginary journey that he describes through hell and purgatory. Yet though everything on this journey is pictured in minute detail, the whole is purely symbolical. Dante depicts himself carried by Virgil, who represents Human Philosophy, through the horrors of hell and purgatory to the abode of happiness in the Earthly Paradise.

This narrative is full of allusions to the life of Italy of his day. His Inferno is really Italy governed by corrupt Popes and political leaders, and he shows by the torments of the damned how the souls of the condemned suffer because they have elected evil instead of good. In the Purgatory we have the far more cheerful view of man, removing the vices of the world and recovering the moral and intellectual freedom which fits him for a blessed estate in the Earthly Paradise.

In these two parts of his poem Dante shows how love is the transfiguring force in working the miracle of moral regeneration. And this love is without any trace of carnal passion; it is the supreme aspiration, which has such power that it makes its possessor ruler over his own spirit and master of his destiny. What power, what passion resided in the mind of this old poet that it could so charge his words that these should inspire the greatest writers of an alien nation, six hundred years after his death, to pay homage to the moving spirit of his verse. In all literature nothing can be found to surpass the influence of this poem of Dante's, struck off at white heat at the end of a life filled with the bitterness of worldly defeats and losses, but glorified by these visions of a spiritual conquest, greater than any of the victories of this world.

Little space is left here to dwell on the most remarkable feature of Dante's great poem—its influence in fertilizing minds centuries after the death of its author. Florence, which once drove the poet into exile, has tried many times to recover the body of the man who has long been recognized as her greatest son. And the New and United Italy, which was ushered in by the labors of Mazzini and others, regards Dante as the prophet of the nation, the symbol of a regenerated land. All the great modern writers bear enthusiastic testimony to the influence of Dante.

Carlyle said of him: "True souls in all generations of the world who look on this Dante will find a brotherhood in him; the deep sincerity of his thoughts, his woes and hopes, will speak likewise to their sincerity; they will feel that this Dante was once a brother."

Lowell, who attributed his love of learning to the study of the Florentine poet, says: "It is because they find in him a spur to noble aims, a secure refuge in that defeat which the present day seems, that they prize Dante who know and love him best. He is not only a great poet, but an influence—part of the soul's resources in time of trouble."

This tribute to the greatness of Dante cannot be ended more effectively than by referring to the sonnets of Longfellow. Our New England poet found solace in his bitter grief over the tragic death of his wife in translating the Divine Comedy in metrical form. Six sonnets he wrote, depicting the comfort and peace that he found in the study of the great Florentine. The last sonnet, in which Longfellow eloquently describes the increasing influence of Dante among people in all lands, is among the finest things that he ever wrote and forms a fitting end to this brief study of Dante: