"Dante" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Art is held and treated by this faculty. Every character touched by men like AEschylus, Homer, Dante, or Shakspeare, is by them held by the heart; and every circumstance or sentence of their being, speaking, or seeming, is seized by a process from within, and is referred to that inner secret spring of which the hold is never lost for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... confined to them, or recommend as he does the 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 ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... vulgar."[55] His knowledge of Italian was no more thorough, though here he was more nearly on a level with his contemporaries. For Boccaccio indeed he showed an intense affection, and he could write intelligently, if not deeply, concerning Dante and Ariosto and Tasso.[56] With French he naturally had a wider acquaintance, but still nothing beyond the reach of the very general reader. The notable point is that he refrains from passing judgment on the entire body of French poetry because it is unlike English poetry. He is ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... university men in the '40's and it might 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 ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... years it has been my fate or my whim to write a good deal about the early days of the Praeraphaelite movement, the members of the Praeraphaelite Brotherhood, and especially my brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and my sister Christina Georgina Rossetti. I am now invited to write something further on the subject, with immediate reference to the Praeraphaelite magazine "The Germ," republished in this volume. I know of no particular reason why I should not do this, for certain it is that ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... one of the darkest riddles of human history. In the Vision of Hell the poet Dante, after traversing the circles of the universe of woe, in which each separate kind of wickedness receives its peculiar punishment, arrives at last, in the company of his guide, at the nethermost circle of all, in the very bottom of the pit, where the worst ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... 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 ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... pretension, and he concealed his own views as closely as he desired to understand the views of others. He possessed very little knowledge of literature. The French he despised and repudiated, although he certainly had studied Voltaire with advantage; of the Italians he knew only Dante and of the English only Shakespeare, both of whom he had studied in translations. In Danish he read and reread Holberg, who throughout his life unquestionably remained Ibsen's favorite author; he preserved a certain admiration for the Danish classics of his youth: Heiberg, Hertz, Schack-Steffelt. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the lovely Beatrice of Dante was only a Disagreeable Girl, clothed in a poet's fancy, and idealized by a dreamer. Fortunate was Dante that he worshipped her afar, that he never knew her well enough to be undeceived, and so walked through life in love with ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... we're between the two fires," said Bob, as they began their perilous journey, "there is nothing much to fear, it seems to me. The next mile is No Man's Land with a vengeance; after that it will be Dante's ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... intellect of his, so keen, so richly stored, approaches the special ground of Christian thought, it changes in quality. It becomes wholly subordinate to the affections, to the influences of education and habitual surroundings. Talk to him of Dante, of the influence of the barbarian invasions on the culture and development of Europe, of the Oxford movement, you will find in him an historical sense, a delicate accuracy of perception, a luminous variety of statement, which carry you with him into the very heart of ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Guido, Rembrandt, De Vinci, Vandyke, Raphael, and also the greatest works of all these painters. It wuz a grand and inspirin' sight never to be forgot. Robert Strong and Dorothy wanted to see the statute of Dante; they set store by his writings. It is a splendid statute of white marble riz up in the Piazza Sante Croce; I hearn 'em talkin' about its bein' on a piazza and spozed it wuz built on some stoop and mistrusted he ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... year, 1869, we find the brothers housed in modest quarters in the Barrio de la Concepcion in the outskirts of Madrid. Here Adolfo wrote some new poems and began a translation of Dante for a Biblioteca de grandes autores which had been planned and organized by La Ilustracion de Madrid, founded by Gasset in 1870. The first number of this noteworthy paper appeared on January 12 of that ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... at Padua again! where I will run, and see once more the places I was before so pleased with. The beautiful church of Santa Giustina, the ancient church adorned by Cimabue, Giotto, &c. where you fancy yourself on a sudden transported to Dante's Paradiso, and with for Barry the painter, to point your admiration of its sublime and extraordinary merits; but not the shrine of St. Anthony, or the tomb of Antenor, one rich with gold, the other ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... building, and the other half to an endowment fund. Professor Fiske also joined munificently in enlarging the library, adding various gifts which his practised eye showed him were needed, and, among these, two collections, one upon Dante and one in Romance literature, each the best of its kind in the United States. Mr. William Sage also added the noted library in German literature of Professor Zarncke of Leipsic; and various others contributed collections, larger or smaller, so that the library ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... valiantly now. Therefore natural Theology may face it likewise. Remember Carlyle's great words about poor Francesca in the Inferno: "Infinite pity: yet also infinite rigour of law. It is so Nature is made. It is so Dante ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... to Honofrius Carazolus of Naples. A register is on the recto of the following and last leaf. This copy is large, but in a dreadfully loose, shattered, and dingy state—in the original wooden binding. So precious an edition should be instantly rebound. Here is the Dante of 1478, with the Commentary of Guido Terzago, printed at Milan in 1478, folio. The text of the poet is in a fine, round, and legible roman type—that of the commentator, in a small and ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... patients letters which Colonel Smith had handed to me for them. They were both dead. I looked down the long list. The word "Died," with the date, was opposite most of the names. As I left the hospital I involuntarily glanced up at the lintel, half expecting to see inscribed there as over the gate to Dante's Hell, ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... suit of a love-sick poet. Later she conducted him through heaven, and made arrangements for his travels in the other place. B. died a famous old maid. Ambition: A lover with money. Epitaph: She Might Have Been Mrs. Dante ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... the great red central chimney with underground furnaces all round, which opened like the fiery graves where Dante placed the bad Popes; and how dreadfully afraid I was that Dora would tumble into one of them, so that I was glad to see her held fast by the fascination of the never-superseded potter and his wheel fashioning the clay, while Mr. Yolland ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... egregious moral failure of the greatest of Christian thinkers—-Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban's—let us not forget that a Savonarola and a Cranmer recanted under torment, and that the anguish of exile drew even from the starry and imperial spirit of Dante Alighieri words and sentiments for which in his noblest moments he ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... 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 fact must ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... shall it 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 to confess at times they bore me. ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Roland), and the sequel is reckless and extravagant, where William of Orange rides to the king's court for help and discovers an ally in the enormous scullion of the king's kitchen, Rainouart, the Morgante of French epic. Rainouart, along with William of Orange, was seen by Dante in Paradise. In his gigantic and discourteous way he was one of the champions of Christendom, and his manners are interesting as a variation from the conventional heroic standards. But he takes up too much room; he was ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... perceptive intelligence; he does not arouse our will, but sings it to rest; and it costs us no effort to break off in our reading, for we are not in condition of eager curiosity. This is all still more true of Dante, whose work is not, in the proper sense of the word, an epic, but a descriptive poem. The same thing may be said of the four immortal romances: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Heloise, and Wilhelm Meister. To arouse our interest is by no means the ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... remind one of Dante's descriptions of the 'Entrance into the Infernal Regions,' does it ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to noble and simple, from Land's End to John-o'-Groat's House, as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... brought before the world with more boldness the problem of the soul and that of humanity. Under the title of poet he belongs not only to our national literature, but occupies a distinctive place in the world of intellect, with Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, among those inspired beings who transmit throughout succeeding centuries the light of reason and the traditions of ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... of Italy who tried to blow,[9] Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song, In his light youth amid a festal throng Sate with his bride to see a ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... 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
... them.[52] Hence so frequently it arises that, in persons of this temperament, we see some bright but artificial idol of the brain usurp the place of all real and natural objects of tenderness. The poet Dante, a wanderer away from wife and children, passed the whole of a restless and detached life in nursing his immortal dream of Beatrice; while Petrarch, who would not suffer his only daughter to reside ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translations from the early Italian poets (Dante and his Circle. Ellis & White, 1874) will not fail to have noticed the striking figure made among those jejune imitators of Provencal mannerism by two rhymesters, Cecco ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Lamp of 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... clasped in its bony arms; and then again the eye would fall upon some solitary figure with outstretched limbs, as if courting that death which on the instant responded to the call. Involuntarily my thoughts recurred to Dante's beautiful description of the Comte Ugolino's children and their piteous end in the Torre della Fame—but here, a sickening sense of the dreadful reality of the horrors, which it was evident from these mute memorials of man's cruelty to his fellow had been endured, ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... has brought forth fruit to time, How should not memory praise their names, and hold Their record even as Dante's life sublime, Who bade his dream, found fair and false of old, Live? Not till earth and heaven be dead and cold May man forget whose work and will made one Italy, fair as heaven or freedom won, And left their fame to ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... all the remains of its former greatness about it, noble palaces, a cathedral second in beauty to that of Milan alone, churches filled with fine pictures, an excellent public library, (God's blessing be upon it, for it was in one of its dreamy alcoves that I first read Dante,) a good opera in the summer, and good society all the year round. Month was gliding after month in happy succession. I had dropped readily into the tranquil round of the daily life, had formed many acquaintances ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... and Charteris met by accident on the seventh terrace of the gardens. Patricia had mentioned casually at the breakfast-table that she intended to spend the forenoon on this terrace unsabbatically making notes for a paper on "The Symbolism of Dante," which she was to read before the Lichfield Woman's Club in October; but Mr. Charteris had ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... forth loud protests and upset him for a day; but his friends found it worth their while to risk some anxiety in order to enjoy his keen observation and the originality of his talk. Wherever he went he took with him his stored wisdom on Homer, Dante, and the 'Di maiores' of literature; and when Gladstone, too, happened to be one of the party on board ship, the talk must have been well worth hearing. As in his youth, so now, Tennyson's mind moved most naturally on a lofty plane and he was most at home with the great poets of the past; and with ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... day in 1895—it was a Sunday—when fog lay thickly over London, Rosamund Everard sat alone in a house in Great Cumberland Place, reading Dante's "Paradiso." Her sister, Beatrice, a pale, delicate and sensitive shadow who adored her, and her guardian, Bruce Evelin, a well-known Q.C. now retired from practice, had gone into the country to visit some friends. Rosamund had also been invited, and much wanted, for there was ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... at the sound of the trumpet clings to the mother's breast, are so natural and beautiful that one believes one's self to be among those who are waiting for judgment. Michael Angelo has expressed in colors what Dante saw and has sung to the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and a fraction of blue heaven. Holding the branch of ironweed before her, Jacqueline passed through the wood toward the light of sky and flowers, and came at the edge of the open space upon a large old tree, twisted like one of those which Dante saw. As she stepped beneath the dark and spreading boughs a man, leaving the sunlit flower garden for the shadow of the cedars, met her face to face. "You!" he cried, ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... or Oxford days, a type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world. To them he seemed to be of the company of those whom Dante describes as having sought to "make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty." Like Gautier, he was one for whom ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... confirmed in this opinion by the concurrence of every person with whom he has communicated on the subject. Among others he takes the liberty of mentioning Mr. Cary, whose authority upon such a question is of especial weight, the Translator of Dante being the only one of our countrymen who has ever executed a translation of equal magnitude and not less difficulty, with the same ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... He is like the Calvinist who is sure of his own salvation, has his doubts about the minister, and thinks every one else irreparably damned. As I say, it is a lofty sort of ideal, but it is not a good sign when that sort of thing begins. The best art of the world—let us say Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare—was contributed by people who probably did not think about it as art at all. Fancy Homer going in for questions of form! It is always, I believe, a sign of decadence when formalism begins. It is just like ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... world, where everything threatens the annihilation of human faculties. Should he have the misfortune to be left here alone, no help, no consolation, no spark of hope, would soothe his last moments. One is involuntarily reminded of the famous inscription on the gate of the Inferno of Dante— ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... 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 i Novellatori, ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... Dante's life, and should we have a Dante? What is a poet's genius but the voice of its emotions? All things in life and in Nature influence genius; but what influences it the most are its ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... watching the strange phenomena of that weird region; on all sides, vast tracts of ashen gray or black, as if burnt to a crisp, with no sign of life, animal or vegetable, the lurid lights flashing and playing in the distance, until it seemed as though they might be gliding through the borderland of Dante's Inferno. ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... of Dante.—Met him at Mr. Griffith's,—Sylvanus Urban's,—another great friend of our country, who insisted on my occupying the seat which Dr. Franklin used to sit in, and after him Lord Byron. Mr. Cary has a good, sensible face, is about five feet seven in height, and forty-six years old, very ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... Raffaelle get his reputation? It may be answered, How did Virgil get his? or Dante? or Bacon? or Plato? or Mendelssohn? or a score of others who not only get the public ear but keep it sometimes for centuries? How did Guido, Guercino and Domenichino get their reputations? A hundred years ago these men were held as hardly inferior ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the foundations of true culture. It is a pretty scene and suggestive—the lad and his mother, reading together "till the wee small hours" Plutarch, Grote's History of Greece, Bullfinch's Mythology, Dante and the plays of William Shakespeare. Fortunately his mother was not his only helper. Near at hand was Theodore Parker who was said to possess the best private library in Boston, and whose passion for ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... it was as though all the most evil passions and desires of man had got into the shell of a magnified crab and gone mad. They were so dreadfully courageous and intelligent, and they looked as if they understood. The whole scene might have furnished material for another canto of Dante's 'Inferno', ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... with Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau, Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element of humanity as the higher and more divine." (Dowden, III.) Within the last few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort of instinct in ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... imitation it is well to select a subject akin to the original and follow the author's construction and trend of thought as closely as possible. For instance, there is a sonnet on Milton—write a companion sonnet on Shakespeare or Dante. Match stanzas to Washington with similar stanzas to Lincoln or Cromwell or any other character who can be treated in the same general manner. Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" suggests other ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... laird, whose forbears, after making a fortune in India, had purchased the estate of Kinnordy in Strathmore, on the borders of the Highlands. Lyell's father was a man of culture, a good classical scholar, a translator and commentator on Dante, and a cryptogamic botanist ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... Christian ruler. The churches which once burnt and exterminated are now only anxious to proclaim freedom of belief, and to cast the blame of persecution upon their rivals. Divines have discovered that the doctrine of hell-fire deserves all that infidels have said of it; and a member of Dante's church was arguing the other day that hell might on the whole be a rather pleasant place of residence. Doctrines which can thus be turned inside out are hardly desirable bases for morality. So the early Christians, again, were the Socialists of their age, and took a view of ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... and killing wild animals. A fine guide, truly! He has had so much experience in aesthetic matters! Or is it metapheesics is his hobby? And what, pray, is his notion as to what life should be? that the noblest object of a man's ambition should be to kill a stag? It was a mistake for Dante to let his work eat into his heart; he should have devoted himself to shooting rabbits. And Raphael—don't you think he would have improved his digestion by giving up pandering to the public taste for pretty things, and taking to hunting wild-boars? ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... the harsh numbers grate on tender ears, And the rough picture overwrought appears, With deeper coloring, with a sterner blast, Before my soul a voice and vision passed, Such as might Milton's jarring trump require, Or glooms of Dante fringed with lurid fire. Oh, not of choice, for themes of public wrong I leave the green and pleasant paths of song, The mild, sweet words which soften and adorn, For sharp rebuke and bitter laugh of scorn. More dear to me some song of private ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... worse. Thee, doubtless, she shall place, not scorned, among More famous songs by happier minstrels sung;— In Shakespeare's shadow thou shalt find a home, Shalt house with melodists of Greece and Rome, Or awed by Dante's wintry presence be, Or won by Goethe's regal suavity, Or with those masters hardly less adored Repose, of Rydal and of Farringford; And—like a mortal rapt from men's abodes Into some skyey fastness of the gods— Divinely neighboured, thou in such a shrine ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... known that—it was known by Dante, who all his life possessed the soul of Beatrice; and Beethoven, who was united from afar with Therese von Brunswick, knew it, though she was ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... expressivissimo, when accused of treason, while personating his favourite role in "Lucia di Lammermoor?" Ah! those who suffered themselves to be detained from the opera on Saturday last by mere illness, or other light causes, will, to translate a forcible expression in the "Inferno" of Dante, "go down with sorrow to the grave." To them we say, Rubini est parti—gone!—he has sent forth his last ut—concluded his last re—his ultimate note has sounded—his last billet de banque is pocketed—he has, to use ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... imitators of Horace flung at Bavius and Maevius. In saying all this, however, we have at the same time made it clear that the power and influence of the individual of genius receives much more positive expression in German literature than in those which produced men like Corneille, Calderon, yes, even Dante and Shakespeare. German literary history is, more than any other, occupied with ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... that great Italian land Where every bosom heateth with a star— At Rimini, anigh that crumbling strand The Adriatic filcheth near and far— In that same past where Dante's dream-days are, That one Francesca gave her youthful gold Unto an aged carle to bolt and bar; Though all the love which great young hearts can hold, How could she give that love ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... daughter of Atlas, and mother of Dardanus the founder of Troy. See Virg. Aen. b. viii. 134. as referred to by Dante in treatise "De Monarchia," lib. ii. "Electra, scilicet, nata magni nombris regis Atlantis, ut de ambobus testimonium reddit poeta noster in octavo ubi Aeneas ad Avandrum sic ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... 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 the form, the presentment grows ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... Dante could have found new horrors for the "Inferno" in the voyage as I made it. From Saturday morning till Sunday night, while the storm was at its height, the waves beat clean over the top of our vessel. A thousand times it rolled almost completely to one side, shivered, ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... occasionally find the same view expressed. As far as I have been able to ascertain, Dante has no ancient gods among his devils, and the degree to which he had dissociated himself from ancient paganism may be gauged by the fact that in one of the most impassioned passages of his poem he addresses ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... there is much difference between me and this Dante. He fled from country because he had one bad tongue which he shook at his betters. I fly because benefice gone, and head going; not on account of the badness ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... duplication of a picture in the same material. Evidently an engraving is not a copy; it does not reproduce the original picture, except in drawing and expression; nor is it a mere imitation, but, as Bryant's Homer and Longfellow's Dante are presentations of the great originals in another language, so is the engraving a presentation of painting in another material which ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... Dante, and I was Virgil, our inferno was an endless procession of tortured faces—faces of women, haggard and mournful, faces of little children, starved and stunted, dulled and dumb. Several times we stopped to talk with these people—one little Jewess ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... the stream was another wheel, whose grisly emblems were reminders of Dante's infernal circles, and were lighted by lurid flames, while little bells were hung round so as to make a harsh jangling sound, and all of the court who had any turn for buffoonery were leaping and dancing about as demons beneath it, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rose every man seemed to wake up and feel new life in him, and they began to talk, just as the dicky birds tune up for a song on the like occasion. Yet the scene was desolate and dreary enough for Dante or ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... child-poet and his three wettings in quest of the adored water-flowers. Nothing could be more beautiful than the wording of the exquisite thoughts, yet I wished we could have seen those thoughts embodied in Provencal, the language practically created by Mistral, as Italian was by Dante and Petrarch, or ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... a poet of the first rank, whose works are increasingly read and {34} will always continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the general reader as well as a "well of English undefiled" to the professional man of letters. With the exception of Dante, Chaucer was the greatest of the poets of mediaeval Europe, and he remains one of the greatest of English poets, and certainly the foremost of English story-tellers in verse. He was the son of a London vintner, and was in his youth ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... adapted to the environment—life in forms strange and weird; life far stranger to us than Columbus found it to be in the New World when he first landed there. Life, it may be, stranger than ever Dante described or Dore sketched. Intelligence may also have a home among those spheres no less than on the earth. There are globes greater and globes less—atmospheres greater and atmospheres less. The truest philosophy on this ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Ivanovna was a very unfortunate creature. "The bread of the stranger is bitter," says Dante, "and his staircase hard to climb." But who can know what the bitterness of dependence is so well as the poor companion of an old lady of quality? The Countess A—— had by no means a bad heart, but she was capricious, like a woman who had been spoiled by the world, as ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... to Professor Max Mller, who made an extended review of it for the "Times," which had on my subsequent career an important influence. During the time I spent in England I naturally saw a great deal of the Rossettis, especially of Dante, with whom I became intimate. He lived in Cheyne Walk, and I in Percy Street near by, so that there were few days of which a part was not spent with him. I had made in America, about 1856 or 1857, the acquaintance of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... if that is what Dryden meant by 'loftiness of thought,' it is not so fair to class Milton with the greatest of poets, as to class him apart, retired from all others, sequestered, 'sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.' In other poets, in Dante for example, there may be rays, gleams, sudden coruscations, casual scintillations, of the sublime; but for any continuous and sustained blaze of the sublime, it is in vain to look for it, except in Milton, making allowances (as before) for ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Praise thou and thine his name. Thou too, O little laurelled town of towers, Clothed with the flame of flowers, From windy ramparts girdled with young gold, From thy sweet hillside fold Of wallflowers and the acacia's belted bloom And every blowing plume, Halls that saw Dante speaking, chapels fair As the outer hills and air, Praise him who feeds the fire that Dante fed, Our highest heroic head, Whose eyes behold through floated cloud and flame The maiden face of fame Like April's in Valdelsa; fair as flowers, And patient as the hours; Sad with slow sense of time, and ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... agricultural interest, or what passes by that name. It never thinks of the suffering world, or sees it, or cares to extend its knowledge of it; or, so long as it remains a world, cares anything about it. All those whom Dante placed in the first pit or circle of the doleful regions, might have represented the agricultural interest in the present Parliament, or at quarter sessions, or at meetings of the ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... Vaughan A Superscription Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Child in the Garden Henry Van Dyke Castles in the Air Thomas Love Peacock Sometimes Thomas S. Jones, Jr The Little Ghosts Thomas S. Jones, Jr My Other Me Grace Denio Litchfield A Shadow ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... nothing in his sculpture comes near to the perfection of his Adam or the majesty of the Dividing the Light from Darkness; his sculpture lacks the serene strength that is found in the Adam and many other figures in the great frescoes. Dominated by the fierce spirit of Dante, he was less influenced by the grave dignity of the Greek philosophy and art than might have been expected from the contemporary and possible pupil of Poliziano. In my estimate of him as a Sculptor ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... who played an important part among the Guelfs, and was obliged to flee to Paris, where he had Dante for ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... before Mr. Roosevelt's time; Milton is a trial of the spirit in three-fourths of his verse; Wordsworth is only not so bad as Byron, who thought him so much worse; Shakespeare himself, when he is reverently supposed not to be Shakespeare, is reading for martyrs; Dante's science and politics outweigh his poetry a thousandfold, and so on through the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... bold handling and a mystic, half-grotesque attitude toward what he found in it of poetry or strength. The feverish and hurried character of his work is sadly evident in many of his most ambitious designs. His illustrations of Milton, Dante, and the Wandering Jew may be said to show his powers at their best,—and perhaps we ought to include his Bible-pictures. Too often he uses without apparent motive feeble allegory and fantasy; and many of his later works must be considered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... now study that of a great painter, but at heavy cost. If you wanted a book, you had to get it written out for you, or to write it out for yourself. But printing came, and the poor man may read his Dante and his Homer; and Dante and Homer are none the worse for that. But it is only in literature that private persons of moderate fortune can possess and study greatness: they can study at home no greatness in art; and the object of that accumulation ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... [Greek: sophotata noemata]; because the rose is the most beautiful organism existing in matter not vital, expressive of the direct action of light on the earth, giving lovely form and color at once, (compare the use of it by Dante, as the form of the sainted crowd in highest heaven); and remember that, therefore, the rose is, in the Greek mind, essentially a Doric flower, expressing the worship of Light, as the Iris or Ion is an Ionic one, expressing the worship of the Winds ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... emphatically literary.[286] His Latin is probably above the average excellence of the age, and if the classic writers held the first place in his estimation—as naturally they would—he assuredly did not neglect the firstfruits of modern literature. Pulci was his favourite poet. He evidently knew Dante and Boccaccio well, and his literary insight was clear enough to perceive that the future belonged to those who should write in the vulgar tongue of the lands ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... doctor! 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 ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... I did when I was alone in my cabin on the good ship, the "Merchant of London," was to open Margaret's box. It contained a full supply of books wherefrom to learn "the only language one can love in," and on the fly-leaf of a sumptuous "Dante" she had written, "From ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... more often happy than grievous. But Kirkup, in the course of his researches into the past, came upon the books of the necromancers, and bought and studied them, and began to practise their spells and conjurations; and by-and-by, being a great admirer and student of Dante, that poet manifested himself to him in his lonely vigils and told him many unknown facts about his career on earth, and incidentally revealed to him the whereabouts of the now-familiar fresco of Dante on the wall of the Bargello Chapel, where it had ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... and I, as 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 ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... growing old. As he sat before the fire in the grand salon, the flickering yellow light playing over his features, which had a background of moving, deep velvet-brown shadows, he might have been the theme of some melancholy whim by Rubens, a stanza by Dante. His face was furrowed like a frosty road. Veins sprawled over his hands which rested on the arms of his chair, and the knuckles shone like ivory through the drawn transparent skin. The long fingers drummed ceaselessly and the head teetered; ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... people of Padua have been as freakish a race as any in Italy; at the mercy of any head but the aggregate's, pack-mules of a notion, galley-slaves of a whim, driven hither and thither in a herd, like those restless leaves (souls once) whose nearer sight first made Dante pitiful. Not that they, for their part, asked for pity or got it. Mostly they paid their tavern bills when the last cup had been drained and the last chorus led. When Ezzelin was master of the revels they paid in blood: that tower of his by ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... do believe, in the first place, that no man was ever good for anything who has not been devoured, I was going to say, by a great devotion to a woman. The lives of your great men are as much the history of women whom they adored as of themselves. Dante, Byron, Shelley, it is the same with all of them, and there is no mistake about it; it is the great fact of life. What would Shakespeare be without it? and Shakespeare is life. A man, worthy to be named a man, will find the fact of love perpetually confronting him till he reaches ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... Dante, Jacopo, son of the poet, was visited in a dream by his father, who conversed with him and told him where to find the missing ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... their notions of what eloquence could be defined to consist in, when his opinion was asked replied, 'Eloquence is truth spoken with fervour.' I am going on with it, though slowly, and fill up the rest of my leisure time with Dante and Machiavelli (with which last author I am delighted) in the morning, and with Boccaccio and our English poets in the evening. Sight-seeing does not occupy much of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... no means behindhand: Dante, Giotto, Brunelleschi, and Donatello were dead, but Ariosto, Raphael, Bramante, and Michael Angelo were now living. Rome, Florence, and Naples had inherited the masterpieces of antiquity; and the manuscripts of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... could meet and salute their innamorate. Duke Cosimo had not observed for nothing the daily walk of his fascinating young neighbour, he never overlooked a pretty face and comely figure, and his heart was large enough to entertain the loves of many women! His experience was very much like that of Dante Alighieri, who one day saw his Beatrice "in quite a ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... direct enmity and warfare against his. In good truth one might smile at the unbelievers whose imagination is too barren for ghosts and fearful goblins, and such births of night as we see in sickness, to grow up in it, or who stare and marvel at Dante's descriptions; when the commonest everyday life is perpetually paralysing our eyesight with some of these portentous distorted masterpieces among the works of horrour. Yet how can we have a real ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... out of account—no distinctly new notes to English poetry, it has added certainly not a few true ones. A nation need never apologize for its literature when it has produced such lyrics—to go no further—as "On a Bust of Dante," "Ichabod," "The Chambered Nautilus," and ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp, at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions,—"Leave all hope, ye that enter,"—that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property, though it was still winter. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... rescue my name from oblivion.' Pliny the younger made me a low bow, &c." We strongly suspect James of quizzing "our host." He noted, by the way, in the chamber were the busts of Hebe, Laura, Petrarch, Dante, and other worthies; Laura ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... channel, roaring and thundering with a fearful noise, which rises in hollow echoes through the aptly-named "Devil's Throat." About this hole no grass grew: the rocks rose wild, jagged, and precipitous, all around it. If ever the ghastly imagery of Dante's terrible "Vision" was realized on earth, it ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... I was far too young to appreciate. Although it annoyed me one day, when I wanted to begin reading Goethe's Faust, to hear him say quietly that I was too young to understand it, yet, according to my thinking, his other conversations about our own great poets, and even about Shakespeare and Dante, had made me so familiar with these sublime figures that I had now for some time been secretly busy working out the great tragedy I had already conceived in Dresden. Since my trouble at school I had devoted all my energies, which ought by rights to have been ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... perhaps, only for myself when I say that reading that, or the like of that in Burns or in Blake, my heart becomes as water, and I feel that I would lose, if necessary, all of Milton, all of Shakespeare but a song or two, much of Dante and some of Homer, to be secured in them for ever. My friend (of the Ramillies) and I were disputing about a phrase I had applied to lyric poetry as the infallible test of its merit. I asked for "the lyric cry," and he scorned me. I could find a better phrase with time; but ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... prelates, grim inquisitors, abbots, priors, and priests of all descriptions, but all somewhat conventional and viewed ab extra. He could not draw a saint.[47] Significant, therefore, is his indifference to Dante, the poet par excellence of the Catholic Middle Age, the epitomizer of mediaeval thought. "The plan" of the "Divine Comedy," "appeared to him unhappy; the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting." ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... a Christian and that horrible time is far from me. I have a qualm in thinking that my stomach has partaken of the author of my days. Meanwhile his flesh has become mine, and what will happen to us both on the final resurrection day?" Here Father Petitot interpolates, "Ah! if she had only read Dante!" "I did not intend to keep my boy with me, he was too young and too weak. I did not wish to devour him. I had no heart for that. I decided to abandon him. At the first camp I left him, and knew they would eat him there. I wept on thinking of the horrible death that awaited my ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... will find that Dante—to cite only the most readily accessible of mediaeval amorists—enlarges as to domnei in both these last-named aspects impartially. Domnei suspends all his senses save that of sight, makes him turn pale, causes tremors in his left side, and sends him to bed "like a little ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... indebted, intellectually, to Plato than to any other 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
... material prosperity, but also attained to intellectual activities whereby in the next century she gained a higher distinction. She took the foremost part in the Renaissance, and was the birthplace or the home of Dante, Boccaccio, and other ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... fabulous and still, curiously enough, as a refuge, the refuge of the great poet of the new age; so that to-day, beside the empty tombs of Galla Placidia and Theodoric, there stands the great sarcophagus which holds the dust of Dante Alighieri. ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... Paradise, were not affected by the political struggles of England. The sole writing of Milton which was affected by English politics, his prose, belongs to literature only in so far as it throws light on the author of Paradise Lost. Dante's Divine Comedy, charged though it be with the political electricity of his times, was but little affected by the state of government. In other countries the government of the people was as much itself an effect of the native endowment of the soul as its literature; and government ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... at the spirit-world have none of that large or universal significance, none of that value from philosophical analogy, that is felt in any picture by Swedenborg, or Dante, of permanent relations. The mind of the forester's daughter was exalted and rapidly developed; still the wild cherry tree bore no orange; she was not transformed into a philosophic ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... baser metals into gold was regarded as trenching on the prerogative of the Creator, to whom alone this power rightfully belonged. In his Inferno (which was probably written about the year 1300), Dante places the alchemists in the eighth circle of hell, not apparently because they were fraudulent impostors, but because, as one of them says, "I aped creative nature ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... no pot-hunter. I think—I am sure—that so long as he kept upsides with money he rather despised it. He had a handsome face—rather curiously like the pictures you see of Dante—and his mind answered to it, up to a point. Fastidious is the word, . . . gave you the impression he had attached himself to Natural Science much as an old Florentine attached himself to theology or anatomy or classics, with a ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Stephen McKenna is tall, with a slender figure, Irish blue eyes, fair hair, regular features and a Dante profile. He has an engaging and very courteous address, a sympathetic manner, a ready but always urbane wit and great conversational charm. He possesses the rare accomplishment of "talking like a book." His intimates ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... with a morsel of bread and water, and no bed or chair, that hunger and unrest might co-operate with darkness and solitude to his hurt. To this horrid abode it is now our fate to follow a thief and a blasphemer. We must pass his gloomy portal, over which might have been inscribed what Dante has written over the gates ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... of his intellect, and then as now popular exhibition of 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
... If I were, then should I be the most ungrateful of all men! Was Dante sorry, think you, when he was permitted to ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... estimated that there were four hundred poets in England in the time of Shakespeare, and in the century during which Dante lived Europe fairly swarmed with poets, many of them of high excellence. Frederick II. of Germany and Richard I. of England were both good poets, and were as proud of their verses as they were of their military exploits. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... "No, dear Dante!" replied the soldier, whose warlike tones rang with the thrill of battle and the exultation ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... mysterious treasures of beauty below the surface, to which we aliens must remain blind for ever, this expression, which broke from the lips of one to whom I was eagerly reading [Mr. Mac-Carthy's translation of] the play, 'Why, in the original this must be as grand as Dante', tends to show that such merits as do come within our ken are not likely to be thrown away upon any fair-minded Protestant. Dr. Newman, as a Catholic, will have entered, I presume, more deeply still into the spirit of these extraordinary ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... book could have been selected: [Footnote: 'No worse 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 those ages held that a powerful enchanter, exorciser, &c., ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... there were still signs, at times, of a vigorous resuscitation. The cure's visits were wont to produce a deeper red in the deep bloom of her cheek; the mayor and his wife, who drank their Sunday coffee in the arbor, brought, as did Beatrix's advent to Dante, vita nuova to this ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... in strength. But what of our own Europe—the home of philosophy, of poetry, and painting? Europe, which has produced Greece, and Rome, and England's centuries of glory; which has been illumined by the fires of martyrdom; which has heard a Luther preach; which has listened to Dante's "mystic unfathomable song"; to which Milton has opened the door of heaven—what of it? And what, too, of that younger America, starting in its career with all our good things, and enfranchised of many of our evils? Did not the December sun now shining look down ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... poet or painter representing the entire group of powers, weaknesses, and inconsistent instincts which govern or confuse our modern life. But we may expect that in the man who seems to be given by Providence as the type of the age (as Homer and Dante were given, as the types of classical and mediaeval mind), we shall find whatever is fruitful and substantial to be completely present, together with those of our weaknesses, which are indeed nationally characteristic, and compatible with general greatness of mind, just as the weak love of fences, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... and shuddered. The contrast was too great —the horror of it too great for her to speak of. The pen of Dante had not been adequate. "Don't ask me, Hugh," she begged, "I can't talk about it—I never shall be able to talk about it. If I had not loved you, I should ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... know, and also with some French. The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear to his lips puzzled me utterly. That afternoon the young ladies from the Rectory (one of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had struggled with Dante for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their German and Italian on him from the doorway. They retreated, just the least bit scared by the flood of passionate speech which, turning on his pallet, he let out at them. They admitted that the sound was pleasant, ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... I myself once threw out a suggestion, which (if it is sound) exposes a motive in behalf of such a choice that would be likely to overrule the strong motives against it. That motive was, unless my whole speculation is groundless, the very same which led Dante, in an age of ignorance, to select Virgil as his guide in Hades. The seventh son of a seventh son has always traditionally been honored as the depositary of magical and other supernatural gifts. And the same traditional privilege attached to any man whose maternal grandfather was a sorcerer. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... fatally burned. He turned from this sorrow and the anxieties of the Civil War to the more mechanical work of writing tales and making translations. The "Tales of a Wayside Inn" appeared in 1863, and seven years later he published his translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy." ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... person. They are fixed by the simultaneous utterance of millions, and yet are always imperceptibly changing;—not the inventors of language, but writing and speaking, and particularly great writers, or works which pass into the hearts of nations, Homer, Shakespear, Dante, the German or English Bible, Kant and Hegel, are the makers of them in later ages. They carry with them the faded recollection of their own past history; the use of a word in a striking and familiar passage gives a complexion ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... souls of the lost, to-night," said Balsamides, drawing his fur coat closely around him. "One can imagine how Dante conceived the idea of the scene in hell, when the souls stream ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... word, and I will love you till my eyes close in death, as the Marquis de Pescaire loved his wife, as Romeo loved Juliet, and faithfully. Our life will be, for me at least, that "felicity untroubled" which Dante made the very element of his Paradiso,—a poem far superior to his Inferno. Strange, it is not myself that I doubt in the long reverie through which, like you, I follow the windings of a dreamed existence; it is you. Yes, dear, I feel within me the power to love, and ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... specified several copies of "Lancelot," "Tristan," &c, some in MS. with miniatures and illuminated letters, and others printed on parchment. Besides numerous religious writings, volumes of Aristotle, Ovid, Mandeville, Dante, the Chronicles of St. Denis, and the "Book of the Great Khan, bound in cloth of gold," the library contained various works of a character akin to that of the Heptameron. For instance, a copy of ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... that, some time after having passed this sheet for press, I was re-reading Dante (as is my custom every year or two), and came upon that other passage (in the Paradiso, and therefore not known to more than a few of the thousands who know the Francesca one) in which the poet refers to the explanation between Lancelot ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... for a drop of water, the devouring worm, all the tortures of the guilty and the somewhat insipid pleasures of the just, reminds one of the scenes in the under world so vividly described by Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Yama is defeated (Sect. XXVI.) by the giant, not so much by his superior power as because at the request of Brahma Yama refrains from smiting with his deadly weapon the Rakshas enemy to whom that ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... confined to the single incident which causes the love or the hate. To hate a single one of God's creatures is to harden the heart to some extent against all. Love is the centre of a circle, which broadens out in ever-widening circumference. Dante tells us in La Vita Nuova that the effect of his love for Beatrice was to open his heart to all, and to sweeten all his life. He speaks of the surpassing virtue of her very salutation to him in the street. "When she appeared in any place, it seemed to me, by ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... 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, come ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... the woodcutters, who have always some trouble on hand amongst themselves or with their neighbours. When I leave the wood, I go to a spring, and thence to the place which I use for snaring birds, with a book under my arm—Dante or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets, like Tibullus or Ovid. I read the story of their passions, and let their loves remind me of my own, which is a pleasant pastime for a while. Next I take the road, enter the ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... low, clear as a silver bell. There are few such voices out of England, but the combination of fair hair with dark eyes is the Venetian style of beauty. Rare in any land, yet there are occasional instances in each. For such, in Italy, was Dante's Beatrice; such, in Germany, was Louise of Stolberg, the wife of the last Stuart; and such, with ourselves, ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... Remember Ugolino[132] condescends To eat the head of his arch-enemy The moment after he politely ends His tale: if foes be food in Hell, at sea 'T is surely fair to dine upon our friends, When Shipwreck's short allowance grows too scanty, Without being much more horrible than Dante. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron |
