His Quotations and His Originality. 
16 
of a single line is too long. His epigramatic lines are 14,228— 
but we wish they were more. Here felicities of phrase are more 
delicate than Gray or Tennyson;—there the dialect of devils out¬ 
does Hudibras, and perhaps Zola. 
As it regards vocabulary he seems sometimes supersensitive 
and finical. He was such a lipogrammatist, so scrupulous about 
a word that the name of Christ is never once mentioned 
throughout the Inferno. Pains are taken in order that each 
of the three epic divisions may end in the self-same word, 
namely “ stars. ” 
Most poets “ for a tricksy word defy the matter. ” Dante 
declares that he never did. We believe him in proportion as we 
mark how his phrases fit, according to his own words, like a 
candle to its socket or a ring to its finger. Rhyme and meter, 
which to so many are chains and clogs, were his wings for soar¬ 
ing above all stars. 
Dante was original most of all in his combinations. 
Whatever materials, no matter how heterogeneous, he had 
accumulated from nature, life or books, he incorporated into one 
body, parts into parts reciprocally shot, and fitly framed to¬ 
gether. He breathed upon it and it became a living soul. It was 
marked all over and instinct in every fiber with Dantesque char¬ 
acteristics. Things insignificant he aggrandized by making them 
subserve a noble purpose as Michelangelo did every stone in 
the dome of St. Peter’s. Where the protoplasmic elements of 
his vision came from he cared not, but his was the protoplastic 
hand which molded them into one organic whole, a whole which 
was greater, mauger mathematics, than all its parts. This 
whole differed from each and all of its parts not only in degree 
but in nature. He put those parts into such relations, and 
correlations that a new element was evolved, one as much 
superior to those parts as electricity, the fire of heaven and of 
God, is above the beggarly elements, of the earth earthy, 
which are its constituents. The outcome is an original creation 
or a transcendent resurrection. 
The grand legacies to mankind from Florence are reckoned 
two. One is a banker’s drafts, and the other is Dante. Dante 
and drafts! Drafts make money to walk invisible while, like 
