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Butler — Dante. 
who meet him so often onward from Francesca in the second 
circle, exhibit traits unlike their classical sisters. They have 
borrowed a coloring, or at least a tinge, from Christianity and 
chivalry. Yet it is most of all in Beatrice that Christian and 
chivalric ideals are sublimated. Enskied and sainted, she sends 
Virgil to the lowest parts of the earth for Dante’s salvation. In 
her own person she brings him up a height Virgil could not 
climb. While living she had delivered him from evil. What 
she became when etherealized by the moonlight of memory for 
ten years after death, is best told in the words of Dante’s great 
brother by the higher birth, who says, in words which no man 
.can mend: 
“The idea of her life did sweetly creep 
Into his study of imagination, 
And every lovely organ of her life 
Did come appareled in more precious habit, 
More moving, delicate, and full of life, 
Into the eye and prospect of his soul 
Than when she lived indeed.” 
The simple truth is that Dante’s magic lines were children 
born of his love. As a boy he had fallen in love at first sight 
with a girl named Beatrice. 0 angelica prezenza! He won her 
heart but not her hand. His disappointment turned him from 
a lover to a worshipper. 
In painting the lost on earth restored in heaven and becoming 
his guide thither through purgatory, lay the veritable inspiration 
of his immortal vision. The gravel-stone which came chafing 
into his earthly shell was transmuted by the alchemy of the 
heart into a pearl which can never lose its luster. 
Original genius is shown in saving Dante’s march from 
monotony. His path lies, now amid whirlwind and thunder, 
earthquake and fire,— yes, demons worse than all, — anon beside 
still waters amid sculptures surpassing Polycletus and even 
nature, with music which quiets all longings, save to hear it 
forever, with spirit-dances accordant thereto, and amid flowers 
bedecking the way and at every turn an angel to show the road, 
and cheer the pilgrim on, and up. 
The style of Dante is all his own, and it is multiform. 
Sometimes it is diffuse like the oceanic Homer. Ten times as 
often it is as terse and tart as Tacitus. Sometimes an epigram 
