His Quotations and His Originality. 159 
The wanderer, while out of the world, is yet of it, through mul¬ 
titudinous interviews. Each change of many-colored life, and 
that in all centuries, rises before him. His talks are with 
Adam and those of his sons whose careers are the soul of all 
history, sacred and profane. His gleanings from all sources are 
all poetical, or become so. So much, however, is recondite that 
every reader is instructed as well as surprised and charmed. 
Whatever may be our forte, scripture, classics, history, folk¬ 
lore, astrology, art, or science of whatever name, we are sure to 
add to our knowledge, and need research for fathoming the 
learning. We confess that his eye had a more precious seeing 
than ours, alike for books written with a pen, and for the book 
of nature, above all of human nature. His sight and his in sight 
appear alike marvelous. 
The Florentine looker-on in three worlds detected more cor¬ 
respondences than Swedenborg with terrestrial life. For illus¬ 
trating his wayside experience he recalls the Venetian arsenal, 
Dutch dikes, grave-mounds on the Rhone, the cascade of Mon¬ 
tone, the baths of Bulicame, the leaning tower of Garisenda, the 
famine tower of Ugolino, Alpine lakes, snow and mists. But 
the line of his side-lights, were we to follow it, would stretch 
out to the crack of doom. 
Italian gestures abound, a universal language thanks to which 
thoughts flash lightning-like nor linger waiting for words. 
Dante too stoops for fragments which others think beneath 
them. Proverbs as about cutting a coat according to cloth, the 
old tailor squinting into a needle’s eye, a sack crammed till it 
bursts, the bush of thorns for a gap in a hedge, the man in 
the moon, the currying hostler, the game of odd and even, the 
doublings of chess-board squares, the animals Adam named, the 
flowers Eve plucked,— nothing came amiss. He even made obtuse 
angled triangles poetical. It was not merely the beauty of holi¬ 
ness which he had in hand. 
Dante’s vision is all a lie, but he lies with a circumstance. 
His circumstantial evidence is so cumulative and coherent that 
we believe him altogether, and we sometimes think that he be¬ 
lieves his own lies. We say with Macbeth: 
u Function is smothered in surmise, 
And nothing is but what is not.” 
