Beacon Lights of History, Volume 03, part 2 | Page 6

real poets are rare,
even if there are many who glory in the jingle of language and the
structure of rhyme. Poetry, to live, must have a soul, and it must
combine rare things,--art, music, genius, original thought, wisdom
made still richer by learning, and, above all, a power of appealing to
inner sentiments, which all feel, yet are reluctant to express. So choice
are the gifts, so grand are the qualities, so varied the attainments of
truly great poets, that very few are born in a whole generation and in
nations that number twenty or forty millions of people. They are the
rarest of gifted men. Every nation can boast of its illustrious lawyers,
statesmen, physicians, and orators; but they can point only to a few of
their poets with pride. We can count on the fingers of one of our hands
all those worthy of poetic fame who now live in this great country of
intellectual and civilized men, one for every ten millions. How great
the pre- eminence even of ordinary poets! How very great the
pre-eminence of those few whom all ages and nations admire!
The critics assign to Dante a pre-eminence over most of those we call
immortal. Only two or three other poets in the whole realm of literature,
ancient or modern, dispute his throne. We compare him with Homer
and Shakspeare, and perhaps Goethe, alone. Civilization glories in
Virgil, Milton, Tasso, Racine, Pope, and Byron,--all immortal artists;

but it points to only four men concerning whose transcendent creative
power there is unanimity of judgment,-- prodigies of genius, to whose
influence and fame we can assign no limits; stars of such surpassing
brilliancy that we can only gaze and wonder,--growing brighter and
brighter, too, with the progress of ages; so remarkable that no
barbarism will ever obscure their brightness, so original that all
imitation of them becomes impossible and absurd. So great is original
genius, directed by art and consecrated to lofty sentiments.
I have assumed the difficult task of presenting one of these great lights.
But I do not presume to analyze his great poem, or to point out
critically its excellencies. This would be beyond my powers, even if I
were an Italian. It takes a poet to reveal a poet. Nor is criticism
interesting to ordinary minds, even in the hands of masters. I should
make critics laugh if I were to attempt to dissect the Divine Comedy.
Although, in an English dress, it is known to most people who pretend
to be cultivated, yet it is not more read than the "Paradise Lost" or the
"Faerie Queene," being too deep and learned for some, and understood
by nobody without a tolerable acquaintance with the Middle Ages,
which it interprets,-- the superstitions, the loves, the hatreds, the ideas
of ages which can never more return. All I can do--all that is safe for
me to attempt--is to show the circumstances and conditions in which it
was written, the sentiments which prompted it, its historical results, its
general scope and end, and whatever makes its author stand out to us as
a living man, bearing the sorrows and revelling in the joys of that high
life which gave to him extraordinary moral wisdom, and made him a
prophet and teacher to all generations. He was a man of sorrows, of
resentments, fierce and implacable, but whose "love was as
transcendent as his scorn,"--a man of vast experiences and intense
convictions and superhuman earnestness, despising the world which he
sought to elevate, living isolated in the midst of society, a wanderer and
a sage, meditating constantly on the grandest themes, lost in ecstatic
reveries, familiar with abstruse theories, versed in all the wisdom of his
day and in the history of the past, a believer in God and immortality, in
rewards and punishments, and perpetually soaring to comprehend the
mysteries of existence, and those ennobling truths which constitute the
joy and the hope of renovated and emancipated and glorified spirits in
the realms of eternal bliss. All this is history, and it is history alone

which I seek to teach,--the outward life of a great man, with glimpses,
if I can, of those visions of beauty and truth in which his soul lived, and
which visions and experiences constitute his peculiar greatness. Dante
was not so close an observer of human nature as Shakspeare, nor so
great a painter of human actions as Homer, nor so learned a scholar as
Milton; but his soul was more serious than either,--he was deeper, more
intense than they; while in pathos, in earnestness, and in fiery emphasis
he has been surpassed only by Hebrew poets and prophets.
It would seem from his numerous biographies that he was remarkable
from a boy; that he was a youthful prodigy; that