"Dante" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as a housewife smooths and warms the yet damp shirts, stockings, and bed-linen brought into the house from the clothes-lines in the yard, is an astounding illustration of that "familiar grasp of things divine," which obtains in so many of our rustic households. Dante or Chaucer, two of the greatest poets of the world, would, had they happened to be "uneducated" men, have seized on just such an image to express their idea of ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... not heard of it? Cape Horn, Cape Horn—a horn indeed, that has tossed many a good ship. Was the descent of Orpheus, Ulysses, or Dante into Hell, one whit more hardy and sublime than the first navigator's weathering of ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... certain data of history and mythology, he has to work his mind into a particular attitude; to put on, as it were, spectacles of a particular sort. If he wants to study mediaeval things, if he takes even so universal a poet as Dante, it is something the same. Curious views about the Pope and the emperor, a crabbed scholastic philosophy, a strange and to the modern mind rather horrible theology, floating upon the flames of Hell: all these have somehow to be taken into his imagination before he can understand ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... that the consciousness of this mystery, resolved into the form of art, expresses itself usually (or always) by symbols, by the part put for the whole. Now and then, as in the case of Dante, as it was with the great romance-cycle of the Holy Graal, we have a sense of completeness. With the vision of the Angelic Rose and the sentence concerning that Love which moves the sun and the other stars there is the shadow of a catholic survey of all ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... and the other public documents relating to Dante are to be found in various publications. They have all been collected and edited by Professor George R. Carpenter, in the tenth and eleventh Annual Reports of the Dante Society, Cambridge, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... you find your laughter at comedy fairly frozen in your throat, by a gelid horror seizing you, to feel that these follies or these crimes displayed belong to that human nature, one and the same everywhere and always, of which also you yourself partake. Comedy, Dante, too, called his poem, which included the "Inferno." And a Dantesque quality, not of method, but of power, is to be ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... of the eyes, which are the prerogative of the poet,—Emma Lazarus was a poet. The beauty of the world,—what a rapture and intoxication it is, and how it bursts upon her in the very land of beauty, "where Dante and Petrarch trod!" A magic glow colours it all; no mere blues and greens anymore, but a splendor of purple and scarlet and emerald; "each tower, castle, and village shining like a jewel; the olive, the ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... shine upon? Think of Plato, or Dante, or Tolstoy, or a Blue Book for such an occasion! I cannot. They will not do—they are no good to me. I am not writing about you. I know those men I have named are transcendent, the greater lights. But I am bound ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... deficiency here often debars from all other courses. Every careful study of the subject for nearly twenty years shows deterioration, and Professor Shurman, of Nebraska, thinks it now worse than at any time for forty years. We are in the case of many Christians described by Dante, who strove by prayers to get nearer to God when in fact with every petition they were departing farther from him. Such a comprehensive ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... book could have been selected.'—The probable reason for making so unhappy a choice seems to have been that Virgil, in the middle ages, had the character of a necromancer, a diviner, &c. This we all know from Dante. Now, the original reason for this strange translation of character and functions we hold to have arisen from the circumstance of his maternal grandfather having borne the name of Magus. People in ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... had to go on any way, for dear life, I thought it a kind of pity and not much good to discourage me. Now all's changed. God only knows how much courage and suffering is buried in that MS. The second part was written in a circle of hell unknown to Dante—that of the penniless and dying author. For dying I was, although now saved. Another week, the doctor said, and I should have been past salvation. I think I shall always think of it as my best work. There is one page in Part II., about having got to shore, and sich, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Provencal "Busac," (whence gradually the French busard, and our buzzard,) you get from it the delightful compound "busacador," "adorer of buzzards"—meaning, generally, a sporting person; and then you have Dante's Bertrand de Born, the first troubadour of war, bearing witness to you how the love of mere hunting and falconry was already, in his day, degrading the military classes, and, so far from being a necessary adjunct of the noble disposition of lover or soldier, was, even to contempt, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... playing still,' Blake added. 'Unbeheld, undisturbed! I verily believe there is no Gael even now who would not in his heart of hearts let drift by him the Elysiums of Virgil, Dante, and Milton, to grasp at the Moy Mell, the Apple Isle, of the unknown Irish pagan! And then to play sitting at the ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... in renown. Men watched and whispered when Dante passed through the streets of Florence; but Dante lives in his achievement, Leonardo in himself. Dante means to us an individual soul quivering through a system, a creed, inherited from the past. Leonardo is a spirit unstraitened; ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... recit and to the conte, as we may say on good authority. The fables of La Fontaine and Perrin, and the Gospel of St. John have, indeed, been translated into the dialect of San Domingo or Martinique; lately we have had a Greek plenipotentiary turning Dante into the idiom of New Hellas; what next? Any one who has seen the delightful 'Chansons Canadiennes' of M. Ernest Gagnon (Quebec, 1880) knows what pleasant things may spring from the naive consciousness of the people. The Creole ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... sunshine mingling with the shouts of a great victory. And here he differs, as indeed he does in almost every other respect, with Macaulay. The Englishman thinks little of nature; as he himself says of Dante, 'He leaves to others the earth, the ocean, and the sky; his business is with man.' Indeed, the absence of a true and universal sympathy is the one vast defect of Macaulay. No position is so high that it may not be overshadowed by the giant form of his ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... Wordsworthians in the historic year 1891, when Matthew Arnold's "Selections" were issued to the public at the price of half a crown. I suppose that Matthew Arnold and Sir Leslie Stephen were the two sanest Wordsworthians of us all. And Matthew Arnold put Wordsworth above all modern poets except Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, and Moliere. The test of a Wordsworthian is the ability to read with pleasure every line that the poet wrote. I regret to say that, strictly, Matthew Arnold was not a perfect Wordsworthian; he confessed, with manly sincerity, ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... native of this town (born in 1772), vicar of Bromley Abbots, Staffordshire, himself a poet of no mean order, translated in blank verse Dante's "Inferno," the "Divina Commedia," &c., his works running rapidly through several editions. For some time he was assistant librarian at the British Museum, and afterwards received a pension of L200 a year. Died in 1844, and lies in "Poet's Corner," ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... external. Adventure, romance in the frankest sense, grotesque individualism—that is one element in medieval poetry, and with it alone Scott and Goethe dealt. Beyond them were the two other elements of the medieval spirit: its mystic religion at its apex in Dante and Saint Louis, and its mystic passion, passing here and there into the great romantic loves of rebellious flesh, of Lancelot and Abelard. That stricter, imaginative medievalism which re-creates the mind of the Middle Age, so that ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... perhaps first introduced him to the treasures of Italian poetry, was undertaken in the king's service. Thorough Englishman as Chaucer was, he had his eyes open to every movement of European culture. His higher and later style begins with his study of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Though he wrote for Englishmen in their own tongue, his fame was celebrated by the French poet, Eustace Deschamps, as the "great translator" who had sown the flowers of French poesy in the realm of Aeneas and Brut the Trojan. His broad geniality stood in strong ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... trivial a word. Her genius goes through everything. We read a great deal together—Dante, Goethe, French essayists, our English poets. To hear her read poetry is almost as wonderful an experience as to hear her play. Isn't it an extraordinary face? One sees it all ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Thomas Griffiths Wainewright Wainewright at Hobart Town Cardinal Newman and the Autobiographers Robert Browning The Two Supreme and Highest Arts The Secrets of Immortality The Critic and his Material Dante the Living Guide The Limitations of Genius Wanted A New Background Without Frontiers The Poetry of Archaeology The Art of Archaeology Herod Suppliant The Tetrarch's Remorse The Tetrarch's Treasure Salome ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... assisted back to the bed-chair, and then, conversation being impossible, Rossi began to read. Every day he had read something. Roma had made the selections. They were always about the great lovers—Francesca and Paolo, Dante and Beatrice, even Alfred de Musset and poor John Keats, with the skull cap which burnt his brain. To-day it was Roma's ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... who are impossible," the Boy said, in dudgeon. "You are too ideal, too content to worship from afar off as Dante worshipped Beatrice. I believe that was what killed her. If Dante had come to the scratch, as he should have done, she would ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... perhaps better be said that the Transcendentalists were college men, but as several of them were educated in Germany the connotation may be allowed to stand. It was said of these learned students that at their meetings they read Dante in the original Italian, Hegel in the original German, Swedenborg in the original Latin, which language the Swedish seer always used, Charles Fourier in the original French, and perhaps the hardest task of all, Margaret ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... one of Landor's favorites, although he was quite ready to allow the greatness of il gran poeta. He had no sympathy with what he said was very properly called a comedy. He would declare that about one sixth only of Dante was intelligible or pleasurable. Turning to Landor's writings, I find that in his younger days he was even less favorable to Dante. In the "Pentemeron" (the author spelling it so) he, in the garb of Petrarch, asserts that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... appeared unto the Hebrew saints and prophets—Moses, Gideon, Samuel, Isaiah, Stephen; this the genius of Paul, the ecstasy of Plotinus, the paradise of Behmen, the heavenly light of St. John of the Cross; this, the Beatrice of Dante, the Gabriel of Mahomet, the Master Peter of Roger Bacon, the Seraphita of Balzac, the radiant companion of Whitman, and ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... un jour un grand philologue, mon cher," said the old man, on our arriving at the conclusion of Dante's Hell. ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... European histories, works of reference generally, a writer who lives in the country must, of course, possess a goodly number. Of rare books I do not pretend to have many. A single shelf contains a few good old works, including a fine black-letter Chaucer, the Venetian Dante of 1578, and some fine examples of the Elizabethan period. I soon found, however, that this taste was far too expensive to cultivate. Last of all, in what I may call the upper Egyptological stratum of my books, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... trustworthy records exist, we conceive this task to be of singular difficulty, owing to the differences of execution universally existing between the large and small works of the painter. The portrait of Dante in the chapel of the Podesta is proved by Dante's exile, in 1302, to have been painted before Giotto was six and twenty; yet we remember no head in any of his works which can be compared with it for carefulness ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the same as those in my University room—the same portraits of Beethoven, Handel and Mendelssohn, as I had selected—hung over the grand piano. In one corner I saw the Venus di Milo, which I always regarded as the masterpiece of antiquity. On the table were volumes of Dante, Shakspeare, Tauler's Sermons, the "German Theology," Ruckert's Poems, Tennyson and Burns, and Carlyle's "Past and Present,"—the very same books—all of which I had had but recently in my hands. I was growing thoughtful, but I repressed my thoughts and was ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... by Professer Raleigh, that 'literature has constantly the double tendency to negative the life around it, as well as to reproduce it.' Having inspired Ovid and Vergil, and been recognized by Lucretius, it passed as a literary legacy to Boethius, Dante, and Jean de Meung; it was incorporated by Frezzi in his strange allegorical composition the Quadriregio, and was thrice handled by Chaucer; it was dealt with humorously by Cervantes in Don Quixote, and became the prey of the satirist in the hands of Juvenal, Bertini, and Hall. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... and Euripides preceded the historians and moralists of Greece, not only Naevius and Ennius, who wrote the Roman history in verse, but Lucilius, Plautus, Terence, and we may add Lucretius, were prior to Cicero, Sallust, or Caesar. Dante and Petrarch went before any good prose writer in Italy; Corneille and Racine brought on the fine age of prose compositions in France; and we had in England, not only Chaucer and Spenser, but Shakspeare and Milton, while our attempts ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... literature of the middle ages culminates in the Christian poet, Dante. History, theology, politics, paganism, sweet and melancholy elegies, flashes of fiery indignation, all men and all generations, meet in his majestic epic. Yet the closest unity is preserved through this astonishing range of subjects; one sublime idea broods over its every line,—the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... hers is genius. Not the call Of Homer's or of Dante's heart sublime,— Not Michael's hand furrowing the zones of time,— Is more with compassed mysteries musical; Nay, not in Spring's or Summer's sweet footfall More gathered gifts exuberant Life bequeathes* Than doth this sovereign face, whose love-spell breathes ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... Chevenix pronounced, with a shake of the head. "At least, they don't marry the right person. They never do. Or there are two or three persons. Look at Shelley. Look at Dante. I happen to know all about both of 'em. Senhouse drank 'em up—and gave 'em out like steam. He thought no end of Dante and Shelley. As a matter of fact, he didn't believe in marriage, as a game—as a kind of institution, you ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... and allegorical style, the quaint and grotesque imagery in which Dante delighted, must have touched an answering chord in the hearts of scholars like Philip Sidney and the Countess ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... narrow windows of this castle, with the spacious view to westward, I thought of Dante. For Dante in this castle was the guest of Moroello Malaspina, what time he was yet finishing the "Inferno." There is a little old neglected garden, full to south, enclosed upon a rampart which commands the Borgo, where we found ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... verse, I want the original;—if he is a bad poet; he gives us bad verse, which is intolerable. Where the original poet put an effect of cæsura, the translator puts an effect of rhyme; where the original poet puts an effect of rhyme, the translator puts an effect of cæsura. Take Longfellow's "Dante." Does it give as good an idea of the original as our prose translation? Is it as interesting reading? Take Bayard Taylor's translation of "Goethe." Is it readable? Not to any one with an ear for verse. Will any one say that Taylor's would be read if ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... to the Troubadours, though certain of them, Dante and St. Francis of Assisi, for instance, by reason of their popularity or the special circumstances of the case, were left in peace. In Europe the secret teaching was continued by the Rosicrucians; the Roman de la Rose is pure Hermetic esotericism. The struggle of official Christianity—that ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... He wondered if Dante when he came up from Hell heard anyone calling amongst the Verdure, in sunlight, any familiar call such as merchants use, some trivial song or ...
— Unhappy Far-Off Things • Lord Dunsany
... it was,—a purgatory lightened for Charles by love, he playing the role assigned by Dante to Paolo, though the infanta was little inclined to imitate Francesca da Rimini. Buckingham fumed and fretted, was insolent to the Spanish ministers, and sought as earnestly to get Charles out of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... like this, where the work of restoration is only just beginning." She frowned, shaking her head sadly. "I could never have imagined God's earth could be transformed to look like a place of torment, and yet this countryside suggests one of the hells in Dante's 'Inferno.' But if you mean are the French people more tragic than I thought to find them, then a thousand times, no! Was there ever anything so inspiring or so amazing as their happiness and courage in returning to their old homes? The fact that their homes are no longer in existence seems not ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... was so dark and weird that it seemed like going into an underground cellar, or an elongated coffin. As those massive wooden doors closed behind us, we felt as though we were about to be buried alive in a well, or were enacting some gruesome scene fitted for Dante's wondrous pen when dipped in ink of horror. The gates slammed. The chains grated. The two oarsmen steadied the boat by means of poles which they held against the sides of those dark walls, the steersman with another ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... Progress has great merit, both for invention, imagination, and the conduct of the story; and it has had the best evidence of its merit, the general and continued approbation of mankind. Few books, I believe, have had a more extensive sale. It is remarkable, that it begins very much like the poem of Dante; yet there was no translation of Dante when Bunyan wrote. There is reason to think ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... down into a kind of dyke, paved with rough tesselation, we vied with each other in telling our charges that this was the old Roman road to Gaul, the Aurelian Way, over which Julius Caesar, St. Catherine of Siena, Dante, and other great ones passed. Then we showed them one of Napoleon's old guns, covered with shells, as when it was fished out of the sea. We enlarged upon the fact that there was no tree, shrub, or blossom ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... about; marvellous, extraordinary, unique—" Evelyn was nearly saying "divine Jeanne," but she stopped herself in time and substituted the word "saintly." "No one seems to me more real than this woman, no one in literature; not Hamlet, nor Don Quixote, not Dante himself starts out into clearer outline than this poor servant-girl—a goatherd in her childhood." And to the Prioress, who did not know the story of this poor woman, Evelyn told it, laying stress—as she naturally ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... Italy created a literature never equaled for bold cynicism. From the Hermaphroditus of Beccadeli to the works of Berni and Pietro Aretino, a foul stream of novelle, epigrams, and comedies, from which the serious Dante would have turned his eyes in disgust, ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... with his white hair and beard, and a certain radiance in his pale complexion, which, I learned afterward, no sun had ever more than browned a little, he reminded me for a moment as he turned, of Cato on the shore of Dante's purgatorial island. ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... if aright your words I read At Dante's passing, he you wed Dipped from the drains of ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... woman I ever knew. Her tact was extraordinary, and she never failed to impress the visitors to Rome with her sincerity and benevolence, though she really possessed neither of those qualities. She was an immense illustration of a maxim of Dante Rossetti to the effect that artists had nothing to do with morality. She was always on the stage—in the most familiar act and in the presence of strangers she never lost sight of the footlights, and the best acting I ever saw her in was in private and in the representation ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... was described recently at a meeting of the American Geographical Society at the Engineering Building by Prof. Harlow Shapley, Harvard astronomical wizard, who told of the ultra-modern scientific version of Ulysses's descent into Hades or Dante's visit to hell. ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... light than the flickering candles half-showing shadowy forms of naked, copper-colored beings; the shadows giving them often fiendish faces and movements, until we could easily imagine ourselves in the realms of Dante's imagination. In time we came to a ladder leading upward into a narrow dark hole, and when the ladder ended we climbed on our bellies some forty feet higher up a ledge of rock to another "heading." Along this we made ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... the peacock on the terrace of the Emir's chief wife, made memorable by Thackeray the prophet." He paused a moment, and stroked his snowy pointed beard. "Forgive my strong language," he added; "really, they are grand adjectives those, 'diabolical' and 'infernal.' They call up the whole of Dante ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... himself under the tutorship of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet, dreamer and artist, six years his senior, whom he had known for some time, and who had ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the very hero that a wondering and waiting audience would be satisfied to see appearing upon such a stage. Except Dante on his background of Heaven and Hell, and Byron on his background of Europe and Time, no writer had in one book placed himself with greater distinction before the world. His glory was threefold. He was the man who was a Gypsy in politics, because he had lived with Gypsies ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... literature.—Back of these sights and sounds we discover men—Cicero, Demosthenes, Homer, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante. We trace the thoughts and emotions of these men and find literature. And in literature, again, we come upon another manifestation of life. Literature is what it is because these men were what they were. They saw and felt life to be large and so wrote ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... interest of its readers and established an immortality for itself. Homer gave the Greeks the grandeur of his Iliad; Virgil charms the Latin race and every cultivated people since with the elegance of his Aeneid; Dante with Virgil for his model and Beatrice as an inspiration wrote in Italian the Divina Commedia, in which he described with all-powerful pen the condition of the dead in the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise; and our Milton after years of preparation, from the dark realm of his own blindness, produced ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... temperature is, during the coldest month, as low as -0.4 degrees to -4 degrees. These continental climates have therefore justly been termed 'excessive' by the great mathematician and physicist Buffon; and the inhabitants who live in countries having such 'excessive' climates seem almost condemned, as Dante expresses himself, "A sofferir ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... fill—long hours, in which that marvellous blossom folded its petals, slumbering sweetly through the summer noontide, and was no better company than a rose-bud. Clarissa tried to interest herself in her old studies; took up her Italian, and read Dante with her father, who was a good deal more painstaking in his explanations of obscure idioms and irregular verbs for the benefit of Mrs. Granger with a jointure of three thousand per annum, than he had been wont to ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Then comes a very creditable array of scientific apparatus,—not of the order employed by the judges of Galileo,—electric and galvanic batteries, an orrery, and many things beside. The library interests us more, with some luxurious classics, a superb Dante, and a prison-cage of forbidden works, of which Padre Lluc certainly has the key. Among these were fine editions of Rousseau and Voltaire, which appeared to be intended for use; and we could imagine a solitary student, dark-eyed and pale, exploring their depths at midnight with a stolen candle, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... another historic element that must also be realized. Without saying anything more of its tremendous essence, it is very necessary to note why even pre-Christian Rome was regarded as something mystical for long afterwards by all European men. The extreme view of it was held, perhaps, by Dante; but it pervaded mediaevalism, and therefore still haunts modernity. Rome was regarded as Man, mighty, though fallen, because it was the utmost that Man had done. It was divinely necessary that the ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... dolefully. "But I am a renegade, or a degenerate. I was allowed to join the classic circle of a Dante Club, and for two years we (perhaps I'd better say I) agonized over the prescribed study—the course was sent out by the university. But when the third year arrived I wearied of well-doing. I was horrid, I know; but the subject was remote as to time, and dead as to issues. ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... Shakespeare himself could not render if the rich language they used, and which was enhanced by their temerities, did not contribute its subtleties to the multiplied details of their observation.[3224] Neither the Bible, nor Homer, nor Dante, nor Shakespeare[3225] could be translated with this style. Read Hamlet's monologue in Voltaire and see what remains of it, an abstract piece of declamation, with about as much of the original in it as there is of Othello in his Orosmane. Look at Homer and then at Fenelon ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... who hovered outside, was described as Hostanes magus (a character unfamiliar to Humphreys). The scheme of the whole, indeed, seemed to be an assemblage of the patriarchs of evil, perhaps not uninfluenced by a study of Dante. Humphreys thought it an unusual exhibition of his great-grandfather's taste, but reflected that he had probably picked it up in Italy and had never taken the trouble to examine it closely: certainly, had he ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... were born, and some of the more precocious, like the Italian, already possessed the style of antiquity. Dante appeared, and, from the very first, posterity greeted him as a classic. Italian poetry has since shrunk into far narrower bounds; but, whenever it desired to do so, it always found again and preserved the impulse and echo of ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... immediately from Rome. The Roman justice disguised as righteousness easily warrants persecution, papal or imperial. The Revocation of the Edict of Passau by a Hapsburg, and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by a Bourbon, trace their origin without a break to that emperor to whom Dante assigns so great a part in the Paradiso.[3] Lord Beaconsfield, with the levity in matters of scholarship which he sometimes displayed, once ascribed the phrase imperium ac libertas to a Roman historian. The voluntary or accidental error is ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Beginners, by Miss Arabella Shore, is a sort of literary guide- book. What Virgil was to the great Florentine, Miss Shore would be to the British public, and her modest little volume can do no possible harm to Dante, which is more than one can say of many ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... friend's eyes. I come across journalists in theatre lobbies; it makes me shudder to see them. Journalism is an inferno, a bottomless pit of iniquity and treachery and lies; no one can traverse it undefiled, unless, like Dante, he is protected by Virgil's ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... swarthiness of Othello, or the deformity of Richard III. Shakespeare's work is much more than picturesque; but it is picturesque. And the same which is said here of him by way of example is largely true of the highest class of literature. Dante's Divine Comedy is supremely important as a philosophy; but it is important merely as a panorama. Spenser's Faery Queen pleases us as an allegory; but it would please us even as a wall-paper. Stronger still is the case of Chaucer ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... let us have the comedy. We hope to have a houseful at Christmas, and I think we may get it up well, chorus and all. I should so like to hear what my great ancestor, Gryllus, thinks of us: and Homer, and Dante, and Shakespeare, and Richard the First, and ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... 44), a fact recorded by none of the other evangelists. St. Luke seems to be filled with a sense of the divine compassion of Jesus, and thus he relates the facts which prove the reality of the grace, the undeserved lovingkindness, of God to man. Rightly did the poet Dante call him "the scribe of the gentleness of Christ." (3) Corresponding with this human character of the incarnate Son of God, we find the offer of universal salvation. St. Luke alone—for the words are wrongly inserted in Matt.—records ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... in a degree. Ormuzd turned the weapons of his enemy against himself: rain, hail, and snow fought for us against the mosquito; but when fair weather came, this pest came with it. It is clear that Dante was not a man of genius! Otherwise he would have put the mosquito (the original, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... the sea shall thy own death come," suggesting that Ulysses after all was lost at sea. This is the rendering followed by Tennyson in his poem "Ulysses" (and see Dante, Inferno, Canto xxvi.). It is a more natural translation of the Greek, and gives a far more wonderful vista for the close ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... since I first heard of The Shaving of Shagpat. I was newly come, in all my callow ardour, into the covenant of Art and Letters, and I was moving about, still bewildered, in a new world. In this new world, one afternoon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, standing in front of his easel, remarked to all present whom it should concern, that The Shaving of Shagpat was a book which Shakespeare might have been glad to write. I now understand that in the warm Rossetti-language ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... shaft of light resulted from the withdrawal of the curtains that masked a window. At this window, which opened outward on to a balcony; I now beheld—and to me it was as the vision of Beatrice may have been to Dante—the white figure of a woman. The moonlight bathed her, as in her white robe she leaned upon the parapet gazing upward into the empyrean. A sweet, delicate face I saw, not endowed, perhaps, with that exquisite balance and proportion of feature wherein ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... "The Capture, Prison-Pen and Escape," in which the horrors of that house of misery are eloquently described. We may, however, say this much, that if the testimony of eye-witnesses is to be credited, it was a fearful place, and one over whose portals the words of Dante might have been appropriately inscribed, "All ye who ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... books is inexhaustible, and that there is always a new constituency to read them. So rich is the vitality of the great books of the world that men are never done with them; not only does each new generation read them, but it is compelled to form some judgment of them. In this way Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and their fellow-artists, are always coming into the open court of public opinion, and the estimate in which they are held is valuable chiefly as affording material for a judgment of the generation which forms it. An age which understands and honours creative ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... ... poesies de Pasquin, toute une litterature se developpa sur ce theme douloureux.... Le Lamento di Roma, [oe]uvre etrange, d'inspiration gibeline, rappelle les esperances politiques exprimees jadis par Dante ... 'Bien que Cesar m'ait depouillee de liberte, nous avons toujours ete d'accord dans une meme volonte. Je ne me lamenterais pas si lui regnait; mais je crois qu'il est ressuscite, ou qu'il ressuscitera veritablement, car souvent un Ange m'a annonce qu'un Cesar viendrait ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... the Hack can scatter into flight Shakespere and Dante in a single Night! The Penny-a-liner is Abroad, and strikes Our ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... of course. The sublime is very near the terrible, and the terrible is often not very far removed from the hateful. Dante giving his "daily dreadful line" to the private and public enemies with whom he grimly populates his hell is not exactly an amiable or attractive figure. Still less so is Milton in those prose pamphlets in which he passes so rapidly, and to us so strangely, from ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... astonishing effects of sounds, however, did not find entire approbation with the public, and did not succeed in popularizing themselves. But that fact can be recorded in his favor that every programme containing Liszt's "Dante," or Faust Symphony, or "Mazeppa," receives more than ordinary attention from the public. The same is the case with his solo songs with piano accompaniment, in which, however, ingenious details often tend to drown the original ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... for in almost the same breath she went on: "I've been in such moods!—since yesterday afternoon—like the devils in Milton, isn't it?—that are swept from lands of ice to lands of fire?—or is it in Dante? I never can remember. We must go straight off, for I'm late. You can come, too—it's only a little meeting about some charity or other. All rich people, of course—except poor me. I'm sure I don't know why they ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... he wrote 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,' and Spenser when he penned the 'Pilgrimage.' Pope, despairing of originality, and taking Dryden for his model, sought only to polish and to perfect. Gray borrowed from Spenser, Spenser from Chaucer, Chaucer from Dante, and Dante had ne'er been Dante but for the old Pagan mythology. Sterne and Hunt and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... as suddenly as it came on, and already lights were moving about in the darkness of the abyss—one, and another, and another, was searching for something lost in the hurry of the scattering. It was a waste and dismal show. Neither of them had read Dante; but Letty may have thought of the hall of Belshazzar, the night after the hand-haunted revel, when the Medes had had their will; for she had but lately read the story. A strange fear came upon her, and she drew ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... Lincoln screamed, Miss Harris cried for water, and the full ghastly truth broke upon all—"The President is murdered!" The scene that ensued was as tumultuous and terrible as one of Dante's pictures of hell. Some women fainted, others uttered piercing shrieks, and cries for vengeance and unmeaning shouts for help burst from the mouths of men. Miss Laura Keene, the actress, proved herself in this awful ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... satire upon that monarch's rule in Spain. Cervantes' Don Quixote altered the taste of the whole literary world. Its influence spread from Spain to France and over all Europe. It was the death-song of ancient chivalry, the first book since the days of Dante to alter markedly the literary thought ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... note that this story is told of no less a person than Dante, about whom cluster more popular traditions than many are aware of. It is the subject of one of Sercambi's novels, and will be found with many other interesting traditions of the great poet in Papanti's Dante secondo la Tradizione e ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... the Graces, seeking an imperishable temple, discovered the soul of Aristophanes. To the grocers and statesmen of Queen Victoria it seemed otherwise. Their taste was a good deal nicer than that of Plato, or of Shakespeare for that matter, or of Dante, Rabelais, Catullus, Voltaire,[10] Gibbon or Balzac, to say nothing of St. Chrysostom (who could not sleep without an Aristophanes under his pillow) or the author of "The Song of Solomon." They did not like vulgarity and they put a stop to it: also in that age Punch and the Times ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... proselytes, and the painter's early frescoes from Tasso's 'Jerusalem Delivered,' came as the specific products of the new era. But the School of Romance wore two aspects; the one, Poetic and Chivalrous; the other expressly Christian; and Overbeck was not content to exchange Homer and Virgil for Dante and Tasso, he turned from the age of Pericles and Augustus to the nativity of Christ. And it seemed to him that the pure spring of Christian Art had, not only in Vienna but throughout Europe, been ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... a life beyond the grave, and an eternal justice, the dumb will speak as they desire, and sing wondrous songs with the angels; the sorrowful will again be happy there. We will hope, we will both hope! Do you remember how I read Dante aloud to you, and tried to explain his divine creation, as we sat on the bench by the fig-tree. The sea roared below us, and our hearts swelled higher than its storm-lashed waves. How soft was the air, how bright the sunshine! This earth seemed doubly beautiful to you and me as, led by ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... death. The other was contributed to the Unitarian Monthly Religious Magazine, then edited by Rev. Dr. Huntington, afterward Bishop of New York. Mr. Emerson says in one of them: "His head, with singular grace in its lines, had a resemblance to the bust of Dante. He retained to the last the erectness of his tall but slender form, and not less the full strength of his mind. Such was, in old age, the beauty of his person and carriage, as if his mind radiated, and made the same impression of ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... be said of nearly all the greatest men who have lived since the dawn of our civilization. Napoleon was not a Jew, nor was Shakespeare, nor Bacon, nor Sir Isaac Newton, nor Michael Angelo, nor Leonardo da Vinci, nor Galileo, nor Dante, nor Descartes, nor Moliere, nor Emerson, nor Abraham Lincoln, nor Goethe, nor Kant, nor even Machiavelli. Thrown on their own resources, what civilization were the Jews able to create? Whilst Egypt, Greece, and Rome have left immortal monuments, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Massey, Alfred Austin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Hugh Clough, Henry Burton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hartley Coleridge, Joseph Anstice, George Macdonald, Robert Leighton, John Henry Newman, John Sterling, Edward H. Bickersteth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and many others. Of German authors there are not a few, including Johann W. von Goethe, Johann C. F. Schiller, George A. Neumarck, Paul Gerhardt, Benjamin Schmolke, S. C. Schoener, Scheffler, Karl Rudolf Hagenbach, ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... a beautiful and singular passage in Dante (which has not perhaps attracted the attention it deserves), wherein the stern Florentine defends Fortune from the popular accusations against her. According to him she is an angelic power appointed by the Supreme Being to direct and order the course of human splendors; ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Congresses, or the skilful valour of a memorable field. M. de Voltaire was certainly a greater Frenchman than Cardinal Fleury, the Prime Minister of France in his time. His actions were more important; and it is certainly not too much to maintain that the exploits of Homer, Aristotle, Dante, or my Lord Bacon, were as considerable events as anything that occurred at Actium, Lepanto, or Blenheim. A Book may be as great a thing as a battle, and there are systems of philosophy that have produced as great revolutions as any that have disturbed ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... that way as his lordship. Pitts and Bale have entirely neglected him, yet for his translation of David's Psalms into English metre and other poetical works, Leland scruples not to compare him with Dante and Petrarch, by giving him this ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... prolonged interruption of my working humour might affect the coherence of the sketch. How often did I sit before those pencilled pages as if they had been unfamiliar hieroglyphics which I was incapable of deciphering! In absolute despair I plunged into Dante, making for the first time a serious effort to read him. The Inferno, indeed, became a never-to-be-forgotten ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... nucleus of such a society, provided all professional men were rigorously excluded. As for the old masters, the better plan would be never even to look at one of them, and to consign Raffaelle, along with Plato, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Dante, Goethe, and two others, neither of them Englishmen, to limbo, as ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... show and is full of cynicism, who has shifted at brief intervals from one shanty to another and never had a fit dwelling-place all his years. When a prophet cometh from the Eternal to speak unto modern times as Dante did unto the Middle Ages, and constructs the other world before our eyes, he will have one circle in his hell for the builders of rotten houses, and doubtless it will be a collection of their own works, so that their sin will be ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... sombre groves of beech and pine which wave along the ridge, that S. Francis came to found his infant Order, composed the Hymn to the Sun, and received the supreme honour of the stigmata. To this point Dante retired when the death of Henry VII. extinguished his last hopes for Italy. At one extremity of the wedge-like block which forms La Vernia, exactly on the watershed between Arno and Tiber, stands the ruined castle of Chiusi in Casentino. This was one of the two chief ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... thought, Could hear a Presence think as he walked Between the boxes pinching off leaves, Looking for bugs and noting values, With an eye that saw it all: "Homer, oh yes! Pericles, good. Caesar Borgia, what shall be done with it? Dante, too much manure, perhaps. Napoleon, leave him awhile as yet. Shelley, more soil. Shakespeare, needs spraying—" ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... the Earth to witness that we have produced nothing at all.... He that accuses us of producing, let him show himself. Let him say what and when." And he never wrote so sternly and justly as when he compared the "divine sorrow" of Dante with the "undivine sorrow" of Utilitarianism, which had already come down to talking about the breeding of the poor and to hinting at infanticide. This is a representative quarrel; for if the Utilitarian spirit reached ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... can't say. Yes—and say! You'll want to go over to the Waldron residence this evening. I'll take you out and show you the house. By George! It must seem extraordinarily odd to walk about among things you are supposed to know like a book, and to be, in fact, a perfect stranger. Dante could have used that idea, if it had occurred ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... this sort was just as necessary, as striking, and as impressive. One does not have to go far to see how the paraphernalia of these early great astronomical clocks had great influence on philosophers and theologians and on poets such as Dante. ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... almost fronted the camp and descended to the valley in a cataract of crags. Here even the persevering thorn-bush could take no hold upon a surface of bare rock, split up into clefts, and chiselled to such fantastic shapes that the whole might have inspired Dante's conception of the ravine by which he descended to the ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... top was a little scoop out of the hill, sheltered on all sides except the south, which, the one time I saw it, reminded me strongly of Dante's grembo in the purgatorial hill, where the upward pilgrims had to rest outside the gate, because of the darkness during which no man could go higher. Here, it is true, were no flowers to weave a pattern upon its carpet of green; true also, here ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... Delight); the fifth of the seven Paradises made of white diamond; the gardens and the plurality being borrowed from the Talmud. Mohammed's Paradise, by the by, is not a greater failure than Dante's. Only ignorance or pious fraud asserts it to be wholly sensual; and a single verse is sufficient refutation: "Their prayer therein shall be 'Praise unto thee, O. Allah!' and their salutation therein shall be 'Peace!' and the end of their prayer shall be, 'Praise unto God, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... day when I met you unwittingly, Dining where vagabonds came and went flittingly. Here's some Barbera to drink it befittingly, That day at Silvio's, Barney McGee! Many's the time we have quaffed our Chianti there, Listened to Silvio quoting us Dante there— Once more to drink Nebiolo spumante there, How we'd pitch Pommery into the sea! There where the gang of us Met ere Rome rang of us, They had the hang of us To a degree. How they would trust to you! That was but just ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... you better get it from her at a safe distance? Petrarch didn't see half as much of Laura, nor Dante of Beatrice, as you see of Ann now; and yet they wrote first-rate poetry—at least so I'm told. They never exposed their idolatry to the test of domestic familiarity; and it lasted them to their graves. Marry Ann and at the end of a week you'll find no more inspiration than ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... with its stately palaces. Dark and frowning piles of mediaeval structure; a majestic dome, the prototype of St. Peter's; basilicas which enshrine the ashes of some of the mightiest of the dead; the stone where Dante stood to gaze on the Campanile; the house of Michael Angelo, still occupied by a descendant of his lineage and name, his hammer, his chisel, his dividers, his manuscript poems, all as if he had left them but yesterday; airy bridges, which seem not so much to rest ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... a pleasant retreat. The music and tableaux in this booth were worthy of the immense audience which crowded the space each night. The Italian poets and authors were represented here and it was not at all unusual for Dante, Michael Angelo, Petrarch and Boccaccio to hobnob over a glass of lemonade with a sprightly fairy from the Jacob Grimm booth or some other personage diametrically opposite in legend and dress. The matinees during the week were prepared in many ways for the amusement of the school ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... the edge of a storm-cloud" (xii. 105 ff.). The shades of the departed, as seen by Heracles on the banks of the Cocytus, are compared to the countless leaves fluttering in the wind on "the gleaming headlands of Ida" (v. 65 ff.)—an image not unworthy of Dante or of Milton. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... that the glass reveals one's true self. Then, not to multiply incidents, Wilkie Collins, in The Moonstone, introduces what Mr. Rudyard Kipling in another story calls the 'ink-pool'; and readers of Dante Gabriel Rossetti will recall to mind the doings of the Spirits ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... that has more aspects than one. If our Father is supreme for us, he is supreme over us. Jesus emphasizes the will of God—God's commandment against man's tradition, God's will against man's notions (Mark 7:8). What a source of rest and peace to him is the thought of God's will! When Dante writes: "And His will is our peace," it is the thought of Jesus. And at the same time God's judgements are as real to Jesus' mind. "I will tell you," he says, "whom to fear, God—yes, fear him!" (Luke 12:5). He feels the tenderness and the awfulness ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... aloud, if they were condemned to proclaim their sins, like the long banner of bat-like souls that Dante saw passing in similar ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... living man, yet he speaks scathingly of his master. Plutarch, Cicero, Iamblichus, Pliny, Horace and all the other Roman writers read Plato religiously. The Christian Fathers kept his work alive, and passed it on to Dante, Petrarch and the early writers of the Renaissance, so all of their thought is well flavored with essence of Plato. Well does Addison put into the mouth of Cato ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... Impersonality.—Personality is lower than partiality. Dante himself is open to the suspicion of partiality: it is said, not without apparent ground, that he puts into hell all the enemies of the political cause, which, in his eyes, was that of Italy and God. A legend tells that Leonardo da Vinci was warned that his divine picture of the Last Supper would ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... langue d'oc,[88] of southern France, of the troubadours, is of importance because of its effect on Italian literature;—the first literature of modern Europe to strike the true and grand note, and to bring forth, as in Dante and Petrarch it brought forth, classics. But the predominance of French poetry in Europe, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is due to its poetry of the langue d'oil, the poetry of northern France and of the tongue which is now the French language. In ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... is worth attention even though it is hot and though the Boul Mich pavement feels like a stove griddle through the leather of one's shoes. For the Dante-faced Max, in addition to being one of the leading piano professors of the country, the billiard champion of the Chicago Athletic Club and the most erudite porcelain connoisseur in Harper Avenue, is one of the survivors of the race of raconteurs that flourished in the time of nickel ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... faltered, he could not continue without emotion the touching tale of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. Amelie's eyes were suffused with tears of pity, for her heart had beat time to the music of Dante's immortal verse as it dropped in measured cadence ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... to London, one is forcibly struck with the gloom of the latter city, especially at night. Paris with its electric lights is brilliant everywhere, while London, with its meager gas jets here and there struggling with the darkness, is as gloomy and desolate as Dore's pictures of Dante's Inferno. On Sunday, when the shops are closed, the silence and solitude of the streets, the general smoky blackness of the buildings and the atmosphere give one a melancholy impression of the great center of civilization. Now that it has been discovered that smoke can be utilized and ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Dante, Fra Angelico, while endeavouring to depict the dance of the blessed, may well have called to mind these verses of a sacred laud, which is said to be by Iacopone da Todi and (whether his or not) describes in popular language the celestial ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... wherever it had power. War and pestilence ravaged town and country. It cost the Church a labour of 200 years to turn the Lombards from Arians and savages into Catholics who should one day be capable of resisting a Barbarossa and generating a Dante. ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... to the eighth circle in Dante's "Inferno," as consisting of "evil pits," which the name means, 10 in number, for those guilty of frauds: contains (1) seducers, (2) flatterers, (3) simonists, (4) soothsayers, (5) bribers and receivers of bribes, (6) hypocrites, (7) robbers, (8) evil ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... period of American history. But the direct literature of that period has passed almost wholly into oblivion. Jonathan Edwards had one of the finest minds of his century; no European standard of comparison is too high for him; he belongs with Pascal, with Augustine, if you like, with Dante. But his great treatises written in the Stockbridge woods are known only to a few technical students of philosophy. One terrible sermon, preached at Enfield in 1741, is still read by the curious; but scarcely ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... Translation of Dante. Five vols. Illustrated. Student's edition, 50 cts. per vol. Library edition, ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... Eumenides; of Senators as in the Antigone of Sophocles; or of village farmers as in his OEdipus at Colonos—and now I have named five of the greatest poems, as I hold, written by mortal man till Dante rose. Or it may be the Chorus was composed—as in the comedies of Aristophanes, the greatest humourist the world has ever seen—of birds, or of frogs, or even of clouds. It may rise to the level of Don Quixote, or sink to that of Sancho Panza; for it ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... elephantine. He neither stops nor hastens, but goes about his business with an implacable deliberation. We could never see him and not be struck with his extraordinary natural means for the theatre: a beaked profile like Dante's in the mask, a mane of long black hair, the eye brilliant, imperious, and inquiring: for certain parts, and to one who could have used it, the face was a fortune. His voice matched it well, being shrill, powerful, and uncanny, with a note like a sea-bird's. Where there ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reading a translation of Plato that gave me great delight, and being rather annoyed by the insatiable questionings of Socrates. Lord Derby's translation of the Iliad also charmed me with its stateliness and melody, and Dante was another favorite study. Wordsworth and Cowper I much disliked, and into the same category went all the 17th and 18th century "poets," though I read them conscientiously through. Southey fascinated me with his wealth of Oriental fancies, while Spencer was a favorite book, put ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... and I was still staring. And as I stared I was repeating to myself the words the people said when Dante used to pass, "There is the man who ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... fifth and sixth centuries, a melange of verse or a combination of prose and verse is very common, as one can see in the writings of Martianus Capella, Sidonius Apollinaris, Ennodius, and Boethius. It recurs again in modern times, for instance in Dante's La Vita Nuova, in Boccaccio, Aucassin et Nicolette, the Heptameron, the Celtic Ballads, the Arabian Nights, and in Alice ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... great peaks of the Dolomites stood out like pink pearls, set here and there in a soft white vapor. Coming through a Canadian-looking pine forest, with log-house barracks, kitchens, and canteens beneath one such peak, I was reminded of Dante's lines: 'Gazing above, I saw her shoulders, clothed already with the planet's rays.' But poetic memories soon faded before a sniper's bullet from a very ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... civilization—once in the thirteenth century, again in the seventeenth, and finally when Napoleon had made himself temporarily master of the Continent. The earlier universities of Europe were modelled on that of Paris, where Dante had gone to study. Frederick the Great despised his native tongue, spoke it imperfectly, and wrote his unnecessary verses in French. Even now French is only at last losing its status as ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... disproportionate study, still less the disproportionate imitation of them. All great artists at all times have followed the same method, for greatness is impossible without it. The Italian painters are never weary of the Holy Family. The matter of Dante's poem lay before him in the creed of the whole of Europe. Shakespeare has not invented the substance of any one of his plays. And the "weighty experience" and "composure of judgment" with which the study of the ancients no doubt does ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... unconscious of its awful destiny, was hard at work, "moving about in worlds not realised." Yonder on the turret of that grey Gothic castle, whose pinnacles point ever upwards to the skies, they stand and wait, a glorious throng; and as they stand they wave him onwards. Dante, Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Plutarch, Montaigne, and many another hero of old is waiting there. See the sharp-pointed features of the Italian bard, and Homer no longer blind! The two are holding animated ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... incorrigible; irreparable, irremediable, irrecoverable, irreversible, irretrievable, irreclaimable, irredeemable, irrevocable; ruined, undone; immitigable. Phr. lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate [Dante]; its days are numbered; the worst come to the worst; no change, no pause, no hope, yet I endure [Shelley]; O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon [Milton]; mene ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Hack can scatter into flight Shakespeare and Dante in a single Night! The Penny-a-Liner is Abroad, and strikes Our ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... tastes, they will understand that, though left alone, he was not lonely. The stock of books which he had bought from his predecessor was to him an unfailing resource. Moreover, he had taken up Italian, of which he knew a little, and was reading in the original the "Divina Comedia" of Dante, a work which consumed many hours, and was not likely soon to be over. To-day, however, for some reason Melville found it more difficult than usual to fix his mind upon his pleasant study. Was it a presentiment of coming evil that made him so unusually restless? At all ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... forth an argument. He gives us the real thing, as he would have been proud to assure us. But poetry will have nothing to do with real things, until it has translated them into a diviner world. That world may be as closely the pattern of ours as the worlds which Dante saw in hell and purgatory; the language of the poet may be as close to the language of daily speech as the supreme poetic language of Dante. But the personal or human reality and the imaginative or divine reality must be perfectly interfused, or the art will be at fault. ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... had he disappeared behind the screen, chattering at an incredible rate in Italian, than a policeman appeared, and he too, chattering at an incredible rate in Italian, disappeared behind the screen. A fearsome altercation was now developing behind the screen in the tongue of Dante, and from time to time one or other of the characters—the lady, the policeman, the first or second gentleman, the waiter—came from cover into view of the audience, and harangued the rest at an incredible rate in Italian. Then a disaster happened ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... the Middle Ages are unable to escape the infection. Dante's "Inferno" would be revolting if it were not so often sublime, so often exquisitely tender. The hideous pictures which cover a vast space on the south wall of the Campo Santo of Pisa convey information, ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... artists is well known, so that they are able to see and represent things and persons, either in words, with the pencil, or the chisel, just as if they were actually present. The image so vividly realized is a necessary condition of the exercise of their respective arts. When great poets, such as Dante, Ariosto, Milton, and Goethe, conceived and idealized their thoughts with every detail of circumstances, persons, actions, expressions, and movements, no one can deny that the images were vividly present ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... conducted school in Boston fifty years ago, my mother was allowed no study time in school, and committed thirty pages of history as a daily lesson. For myself, at a time when we were pursuing languages and the higher mathematics, we took a whole canto of Dante three times a week, and were required to give an explanation of every historical allusion. I had no study time in school; but neither my mother, nor myself, nor any girls in my class, were in the least injured by anything required ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... inspired artists who broke the bonds of Byzantine traditions and turned back to the inspiration of all art, which is Nature. Giotto, tending his sheep, began to draw pictures of things as he saw them, Savonarola awoke the conscience, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio—a string of names to conjure with—all roused the intellect. The dawn of the Renaissance flushed Europe with the life of civilisation. But before the wonderful development of art through the reversion to classic lines, came a high perfection of the style called Gothic, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... a red-covered book bearing the delicious title of "Baedeker's Hades: A Hand-book for Travellers," which has entirely superseded, according to the advertisement on the fly-leaves, such books as Virgil and Dante's Inferno as the best guide to the lower regions, as well it might, for it appeared on perusal to have been prepared with as much care as one of the more material guide-books of the same publisher, which so greatly assist travellers on this ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... is true, something of the dignity of Dante's, for it was his caprice to walk up and down the High Street at noonday with one of those cascades of coloured paper which were known as 'ornaments for your fireplace' slung over the back and another over the front of his body. These he manufactured ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... book even professes to have a hidden meaning, it is interpreted by a special set of canons. Thus Dante's great poem[146] may not be read as Hume's History of ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... for expansion and conquest. The proclamations of the Entente, the declarations of Wilson's principles, or points, became so contorted that no trace of them could be found in the treaties, save for that ironic covenant of the League of Nations, which is always repeated on the front page, as Dante said of the rule of St. Benedict, at the expense ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... towers, where noble fought against noble, citizen with citizen, and servant with servant. Literature was only trying to begin, to find its form, to find its own Italian tongue, to understand what it desired. It took more than a century after Sordello's youth to shape itself into the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, into their prose and the prose of Boccaccio. The Vita Nuova was set forth in 1290, 93, the Decameron in 1350, 53, and Petrarch was crowned at Rome in 1341. And the arts of sculpture and painting were in the ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke |
