156 
Butler — Dante. 
This view I find in keeping with the most recent utterance of 
the Edinboro’ Review (Vol. CLXXXI, p. 298), where it is said; 
“Much of a great writer’s originality may consist in attaining 
sublime objects by the same means which others had employed 
for mere trifling. ” 
The shadow of Dante demands a moment’s digression. It 
gave Chamisso the idea of Peter Schlemihl, the man who had 
lost his shadow,— a work which was at once translated into 
all European tongues, and which led to an analogous book this 
side the water entitled “ The Modern Pilgrim, or Peter Schlemihl 
in America, ” a religious novel which had great denominational 
popularity. “The Shadow of Dante” also became the title of a 
volume in 300 pages concerning him by a famous Italian exile, 
Francesca Rossetti as well as of a review of the same and its 
subject in the North American. This article by James Russell 
Lowell, the outcome of “ twenty years assiduous study, ” covers 
seventy pages and is well-nigh the best tribute ever paid by any 
Dantophilist to the sublimest of Italian geniuses. But however 
much Dante borrowed he made everything his own. 
A common emblem of originality is the spider who spins his 
web out of himself. In truth, however, he is no more original 
than the bee who pilfers from a myriad of flowers. The spider’s 
raw material comes at last from without as really, though not 
as obviously, as the bee’s. Each is alike original, for each 
produces what no other creature can, a product all its own. The 
more each takes in, the more it gives out, stamped with its own 
likeness, in nature’s mint of ecstasy. 
The originality of Dante is conspicuous in his choice of a 
theme. His epic, and his alone, is extra-mundane from first to 
last. It has nothing to do with the surface of the earth, where, 
aside from brief episodes, all scenes in the Iliad, Odyssey and 
the ACneid are represented. He says, indeed, that earth as well 
as heaven had a hand in his poem. By earth, however, he 
means, either its infernal prison, or Purgatory which had been 
ejected out of its abysses like the volcanic cone of iEtna in the 
island of fire and piled up heaven-high. 
Dante’s poem is also exceptionally religious. The old epics 
were in a sense religious; the Iliad setting forth divine 
