"Dante" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is the author of a Hymn to Passion week, and wrote to me as the 'glorifier of pain!' to remind me that the best glory of a soul is shown in the joy of it, and that all chief poets except Dante have seen, felt, and written it so. Thus and therefore was matured his purpose of writing an 'ode to joy,' as I told you. The man seems to have very good thoughts, ... but he writes like a colder Cowley still ... no impulse, no heat for fusing ... no inspiration, in fact. ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... eleventh century. About the twelfth century the German mind was further illuminated by that mysterious, visionary, titanic, Teutonic epic, the Niebelungen Lied; and a little later appeared the troubadours in the south of Europe and the minnesingers (love-singers) in Germany. Next came Dante and Giotto in Italy, then Chaucer in England; so that by the end of the fourteenth century, poetry and the arts, the offspring of the beautiful,—and who can have no other parentage,—had established themselves in the modern European mind, and have since, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... doubtless, she shall place, not scorned, among More famous songs by happier minstrels sung;— In Shakespeare's shadow thou shalt find a home, Shalt house with melodists of Greece and Rome, Or awed by Dante's wintry presence be, Or won by Goethe's regal suavity, Or with those masters hardly less adored Repose, of Rydal and of Farringford; And—like a mortal rapt from men's abodes Into some skyey fastness of the gods— Divinely neighboured, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... ship a volume of translations from Dante, by Doctor Parsons of Boston, a practising dentist and the son of a dentist. It is his gift to you. Lately went Henry James to you with a letter from me. He is a fine companion from his intelligence, valor, and worth, and is and has been a very beneficent person as I learn. He carried a volume ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... free schools, churches, and printing presses. Ignorance breeds misery, vice, and crime. Mephistopheles was a cultured devil, but he is the exception. History knows no illiterate seer or sage or saint. No Dante or Shakespeare ever had to ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... season," says Boccaccio, in his Life of Dante, "when the sweetness of heaven reclothes the earth with its adornments, and makes it all smiling with flowers among the green leaves, it was the custom in our city for the men and for the ladies to celebrate festivals in their own streets in separate companies. Wherefore it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... have been as freakish a race as any in Italy; at the mercy of any head but the aggregate's, pack-mules of a notion, galley-slaves of a whim, driven hither and thither in a herd, like those restless leaves (souls once) whose nearer sight first made Dante pitiful. Not that they, for their part, asked for pity or got it. Mostly they paid their tavern bills when the last cup had been drained and the last chorus led. When Ezzelin was master of the revels they ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... he always did, the general paused at the pile monitor and watched, in the Dante screen, the virtually indescribable reactions being sustained far beneath the surface: molten rock flowing and smoking. Orange, blue and white flames danced as though in agony in the great, expanding ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... imaginative works shows that this explanation is untrue. That the bizarre and apparently novel products arise from the experiences of the author, revived in imagination and combined in new ways. The horrendous incidents depicted in Dante's "Divine Comedy" never occurred within the lifetime experience of the author as such. Their separate elements did, however, and furnished the basis for Dante's clever combinations. The oft-heard saying that there is nothing new under the ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... barter in your low bazaar— Though Beauty die for it from star to star. You are the god of Judas and those who Betrayed Him unto nail and thorn and sword! Of that relentless worm-bit Florence horde Who drove lone Dante from them till he grew So great in death they begged his bones to strew Their pride and wealth and useless praise upon. Anathema! I cry; and will, till none Of all earth's ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... select complete types of one or the other. Roughly, perhaps, one might speak of the Hebraic Dante, Bunyan, or Carlyle; of the Hellenic Johnson, Goethe or Tennyson: but one could not rightly draw up two catalogues of authors and set them in contrast as perfect embodiments, the one of Hebraism, the other of Hellenism. ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... this opinion by the concurrence of every person with whom he has communicated on the subject. Among others he takes the liberty of mentioning Mr. Cary, whose authority upon such a question is of especial weight, the Translator of Dante being the only one of our countrymen who has ever executed a translation of equal magnitude and not less difficulty, with the same ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... layman, and that the Tuscan mission of 1373, which perhaps first introduced him to the treasures of Italian poetry, was undertaken in the king's service. Thorough Englishman as Chaucer was, he had his eyes open to every movement of European culture. His higher and later style begins with his study of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Though he wrote for Englishmen in their own tongue, his fame was celebrated by the French poet, Eustace Deschamps, as the "great translator" who had sown the flowers of French poesy ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... Fanny, while a very becoming blush glowed on her cheek; "how you do interrupt me! Mr. Oaklands had kindly offered to explain a difficult passage in Dante for me, and I was standing on a chair ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... assured him. "Nature guards her best men with some sort of singularity not attractive to others. Often she makes them odious with conceit or deformity or dumbness or garrulity. Dante was such a poor talker that no one would ever ask him to dinner. If it had not been so I presume his muse would have been sadly crippled by indigestion. If you had been a good dancer and a lady's favorite I wonder if you would have studied Kirkham and Burns and Shakespeare ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... Chaucer in the history of his art be considered, and it will be seen that those who maintain a systematic art in him have a relief from objections greater than those who should enquire concerning perhaps any other poet. In the formation of his verse, and the lifting up of a rude language, more than Dante himself, a creator! What wonder, then, if he should sometimes make mistakes, and that some inconsistencies remain at last irreducible? If the method undertaken draws the irreducible cases into a narrower and a narrower compass, that sufficiently ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... masses, crushing national life, fattening itself and its officials on a system of world-wide robbery; and while it was paramount, there could be no hope for the human race. Nay, there were even those among the Christians who saw, like Dante afterwards, in the 'fatal gift of Constantine,' and the truce between the Church and the Empire, fresh and more deadly danger. Was not the Empire trying to extend over the Church itself that upas shadow with which ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... a foretaste of Charon's boat!" said Mary, who was one of those people whose spirit of enterprise rises with the occasion, and she murmured to Mary Seaton the line of Dante— ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... converse on such topics, with any one. If any one attempted to lead conversation in that direction, he would either be silent, or in a significant manner change the subject. He had a favourite copy of Dante lying often near him, and it may be interesting to state, that he has left, underscored in pencil, the two following verses in the third canto, (Del Purgatorio,) expressive of faith in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... Harris cried for water, and the full ghastly truth broke upon all—"The President is murdered!" The scene that ensued was as tumultuous and terrible as one of Dante's pictures of hell. Some women fainted, others uttered piercing shrieks, and cries for vengeance and unmeaning shouts for help burst from the mouths of men. Miss Laura Keene, the actress, proved herself in this awful time as equal to sustain a part in real tragedy as to interpret ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... ennui"—it seemed to me there were still signs, at times, of a vigorous resuscitation. The cure's visits were wont to produce a deeper red in the deep bloom of her cheek; the mayor and his wife, who drank their Sunday coffee in the arbor, brought, as did Beatrix's advent to Dante, vita ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... robbing me of all the good I have in this world." Messer Giovanni Gaddi, who was present, then began to say: "The poor fellow is delirious, and has only a few hours to live." His fellow, Mattio Franzesi, remarked: "He has read Dante, and in the prostration of his sickness this apparition has appeared to him" [3] then he added laughingly: "Away with you, old rascal, and don't bother our friend Benvenuto." When I saw that they were making fun of me, I turned to Messer Gaddi and said: "My dear master, ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... into my own room, which was empty. I went to the room of my two warmest friends, whose friendship I was and am yet assured of. As usual, half a dozen of our set were lounging there. A game of whist was just commencing. I perched on a bust of Dante on the top of the book-shelves, where I could see two of the hands and give a good guess at a third. My particular friend Timmins was ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... blowing with tremendous force and increasing to the power of a hurricane each instant as it whistled through the cordage, wailing and shrieking like the lost souls in Dante's "Inferno." The momentarily quiet sea, too, had got up again, and was now covered with huge broken waves—raised aloft in pyramids one moment, and the next scooped out into yawning valleys, into which the vessel plunged, with a shock ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... un grand philologue, mon cher," said the old man, on our arriving at the conclusion of Dante's Hell. ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... break and fade at the touch of the first cold wave of the Infinite. As for the further road in which he was about to turn and go, that, to his fancy, was a nearer similitude of an approach to hell than any scene ever portrayed in Dante's Divine Comedy. For it led to the crowded haunts of men—the hives of greedy business,—the smoky, suffocating centres where each human unit seeks to over-reach and outrival the other—where there is no time to be kind—no room to be courteous; ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... the two fires," said Bob, as they began their perilous journey, "there is nothing much to fear, it seems to me. The next mile is No Man's Land with a vengeance; after that it will be Dante's Inferno with ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... in a Galway village who can see nothing but wickedness. Some think him very holy, and others think him a little crazed, but some of his talk reminds one of those old Irish visions of the Three Worlds, which are supposed to have given Dante the plan of the Divine Comedy. But I could not imagine this man seeing Paradise. He is especially angry with the people of faery, and describes the faun- like feet that are so common among them, who are indeed children of Pan, to prove ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... half aloud!—"MY Florian!" And she recalled certain lines of verse he had written to her,—for most Italians write verse as easily as they eat maccaroni;—and there are countless rhymes to "amor" in the dulcet Dante-tongue, whereas our rough English can only supply for the word "love" some three or four similar sounds,—which is perhaps a fortunate thing. Angela spoke English and French as easily and fluently as ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... to do with the real appreciation of the literary value of an author than is generally thought. In rare instances, it throws a light, but the examples in which we know practically nothing at all, as in that of Shakespeare, or only a few leading facts as in that of Dante, are not those in which criticism is least useful or least satisfactory. At the same time biographical and anecdotic details please most people, and if they are not allowed to shoulder out criticism altogether, there can be no harm in them. For myself, I should like to ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Panza heard proceeding from the fulling mill, must be endured. Could not philosophy by stoic firmness shut out the sound? Can philosophy shut out anything that is real? A long black streak of smoke hung over the water, fouling the gleaming surface. A noise of Dante—hideous, uncompromising as the rusty hinge of the gate which forbids hope. ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... by this arrangement. His Library numbers near 20,000 volumes, many of which have overflowed into adjoining rooms, where they are similarly stored. Of this number Theology claims a large proportion; Homer, Dante, {28a} and Shakespeare also have their respective departments, and any resident visitor is at liberty, on entering his or her name in a book kept for the purpose, to borrow any volume at pleasure. Three writing-tables are seen. At one Mr. Gladstone sits when busy in ...
— The Hawarden Visitors' Hand-Book - Revised Edition, 1890 • William Henry Gladstone
... gaily or as bravely as you did, for I have been pretty well beaten down to my knees. My nights are so unforgivably bad—wakened up two or three times, always with this Monster squeezing my heart in his Mammoth hand—By God, it is something Dante overlooked ... ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... printing press, to which we owe many beautiful publications, some unpublished sermons of St. Augustine's, several works by the eloquent and learned Father Tosti, &c. They had prepared an edition of an unpublished Commentary on Dante, and also of the valuable correspondence of Mabillon, Montfaucon, and other clerics of the Congregation of St. Maur, when, in consequence of the events of 1848, their printing presses were sequestrated. At that time they were suspected of Liberalism. ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... the object of her father's particular attention. Her progress in the study of music and of foreign languages was surprising; Albaneze instructed her in singing, and Goldoni taught her Italian. Tasso, Milton, Dante, and even Shakespeare, soon became familiar to her. But her studies were particularly directed to the acquisition of a correct and elegant style of reading. Rochon de Chabannes, Duclos, Barthe, Marmontel, and Thomas took pleasure in ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... alike are contributions to philosophical poetry in an age when the Italians had lost their ancient manliness and energy. Both were united by the ties of study and affection to the greatest singer of their nation, Dante, at a time when Petrarch, thrice diluted and emasculated, was the ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... that he comes to regard the world of men as an empty show and is full of cynicism, who has shifted at brief intervals from one shanty to another and never had a fit dwelling-place all his years. When a prophet cometh from the Eternal to speak unto modern times as Dante did unto the Middle Ages, and constructs the other world before our eyes, he will have one circle in his hell for the builders of rotten houses, and doubtless it will be a collection of their own works, so that their sin ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... of Dante's Convito—the first in English—is from the hand of a lady whose enthusiasm for the genius of Dante has made it a chief pleasure of her life to dwell on it by translating, not his Divine Comedy only, but also the whole body of his other works. ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... Retreat Henry Vaughan A Superscription Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Child in the Garden Henry Van Dyke Castles in the Air Thomas Love Peacock Sometimes Thomas S. Jones, Jr The Little Ghosts Thomas S. Jones, Jr My Other Me Grace Denio Litchfield A Shadow Boat Arlo Bates ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... well knew it could not be sustained, and would have to give way to pressure from other quarters—writing, painting, etching, or reading. The study of Italian had also been vigorously resumed, so that in the diary I see this note regularly: "Practised Spohr and Kreutzer, or Beethoven. Read Dante." I also find the following in April: "Spent the greater part of the day in planning my new novel with Charles (his brother-in-law). Worked on plan of my novel, and modified it by talking it over with my wife," I ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... represent unostentatious yet affectionate tributes to three of the most illustrious names in literature and art: DANTE, and PETRARCH, the celebrated Italian poets; and CANOVA, whose labours have all the freshness and finish of yesterday's chisel. Lord Byron, whose enthusiasm breathes and lives in words that "can never die," has enshrined these memorials in the masterpiece of his genius. Associating ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... assertion the poet himself would, I suspect, be the very first to deny. Your promise of Dr. Parsons's poem is very delightful to me. I hold firm to my admiration of those stanzas on Webster. Nothing written on the Duke came within miles of it, and I have no doubt that the poem on Dante's bust is equally fine.... Mr. Justice Talfourd has just printed a new tragedy. He sent it to me from Oxford, not from Reading, where he had passed four days and never gave a copy to any mortal, and told me, in a very affectionate letter which accompanied it, that "it was at present a very ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... to the water, as we had imagined, but having a dull and prison-like aspect; if, indeed, any place can have that aspect where trees grow, and grass is checkered by their ever-varying shadows. The house was occupied from 1814 to 1832 by Cary, the translator of Dante; and it would be worth a pilgrimage if considered only as the residence of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... waiting upon the influence of time. He combated the Squire's equally simple creed—the unbroken union of the States. She fought the rector hard, to his delight. Far more pleasant on three afternoons in the week were the lessons in Italian with her aunt, and Rivers's brilliant commentary on Dante. The months ran on into and through the winter, with an economical Christmas to ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... the distant Alps—or the midnight moon sleeping on the lake. He spent half the day, and often half the night, in solitary rambles, weaving his airy rhymes, or indulging his gloomy reveries, and he thought loneliness made the element of a poet. Alas! Dante, Alfieri, even Petrarch might have taught him, that a poet must have intimate knowledge of men as well as mountains, if he desire to become the CREATOR. When Shelley, in one of his prefaces, boasts of being familiar ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... literatures were born, and some of the more precocious, like the Italian, already possessed the style of antiquity. Dante appeared, and, from the very first, posterity greeted him as a classic. Italian poetry has since shrunk into far narrower bounds; but, whenever it desired to do so, it always found again and preserved the impulse and echo of its lofty origin. It is no indifferent matter ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... men are moved to philanthropy, some to science, some to be rulers of men. Some men are brimful and running over with harmonies that will live forever. Other men's hearts beat in unison with the symphonies of the spheres, and Homer and Milton and Dante become household words. You seek another expression of the good that is in you. You will be painters and sculptors. Color, form, and mass are to you what the pen, the sword, and the lute are to those others who have gone before, or are now around you. Your mission is as ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... Dutch School of Painters') Albert Duerer's 'Melancholia' (same) Ingres ('Life of Ingres') Calamatta's Studio ('Contemporary Artists') Blanc's Debut as Art Critic (same) Delacroix's 'Bark of Dante' (same) Genesis of the 'Grammar' Moral Influence of Art ('Grammar of Painting and Engraving') Poussin's 'Shepherds of Arcadia' (same) Landscape (same) Style (same) Law of Proportion ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... hardly be explained that, in the case of a modern poet, these various readings are not like the conjectural guesses of critics and commentators as to what the original text was (as in the case of the Greek Poets, or of Dante, or even of Shakespeare). They are the actual alterations, introduced deliberately as improvements, by the hand of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... duplication of a picture in the same material. Evidently an engraving is not a copy; it does not reproduce the original picture, except in drawing and expression; nor is it a mere imitation, but, as Bryant's Homer and Longfellow's Dante are presentations of the great originals in another language, so is the engraving a presentation of painting in another material which ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... not one of Landor's favorites, although he was quite ready to allow the greatness of il gran poeta. He had no sympathy with what he said was very properly called a comedy. He would declare that about one sixth only of Dante was intelligible or pleasurable. Turning to Landor's writings, I find that in his younger days he was even less favorable to Dante. In the "Pentemeron" (the author spelling it so) he, in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... unable to hear any more because Mrs. Haverstock led him up to a lean, staring youth with goggle eyes who, she said, had promised to read several of his poems to the guests and to open a discussion on Marriage. The goggle-eyed poet informed John that Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley and Browning were comic old gentlemen who entirely misunderstood the nature and function of poetry. He had founded a new school of poetry. It appeared from his account of this school ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... Renaissance and the birthplace of important new ideas which give the intellectual life of the sixteenth century its character of brave endeavor after high and distant ends. The enthusiasm for ancient literature already aroused by the native poets, Dante (1300), Petrarch (1341), and Boccaccio (1350), was nourished by the influx of Greek scholars, part of whom came in pursuance of an invitation to the Council of Ferrara and Florence (1438) called in behalf of the union of the Churches (among these were Pletho and his pupil ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... seem to me the most of any that are written or spoken. They strike the key-note of so many human agonies, that they might form a motto, apter than Dante's, for the gates of hell. Very few may hear them without a melancholy thrill; well—if they do not bring a bitter pang. Like those awful conjurations that blanched in utterance the lips of the boldest ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... possess much of the spirit of Christianity, would naturally study it and frequently use it; and Boethius's book, with more or less adaptation, grew to be a great favourite with Christians. Its influence can be traced in the work of the greatest Catholic poet, Dante, and in that of the great English poet, Chaucer, who rendered it into the English of ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... that there was here a genuine growth of the soil, a vigorous vegetation of the plebeian stock was shown by an entire national art arising from it—the precursors of the Renascence in painting and even Dante himself, the soul ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... in that habit of co-operative reading and writing which is one of the finest traits of his married life. 'I write in the morning,' his wife testifies, 'read Latin till 2, when we dine; then I read some English book, and two cantos of Dante with Shelley [Footnote: Letter to Mrs. Hunt, 28 August 1819.]—a fair average, no doubt, of the homely aspect of the great days which produced ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... glorify the Reformation of the sixteenth century as the emancipation of Reason; but it may be doubted if their contention has any solid ground; while there is a good deal of evidence to show, that aspirations after intellectual freedom had nothing whatever to do with the movement. Dante, who struck the Papacy as hard blows as Wicliff; Wicliff himself and Luther himself, when they began their work; were far enough from any intention of meddling with even the most irrational of the dogmas of mediaeval Supernaturalism. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... unawares. She seemed to hear a cry of rage, answered by a sigh of terror; then a double shot resounded, the room filled with smoke, and, struck down in their guilty love, Serge and Jeanne rolled in death, interlaced in each other's arms, like Paolo and Francesca de Rimini, those sad lovers of whom Dante tells us. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... and an enormous beard that tumbled far down his breast. This personage was Pisander, Valeria's "house-philosopher," who was expected to be always at her elbow pouring into her ears a rain of learned lore. For this worthy lady (and two thousand years later would she not be attending lectures on Dante or Browning?) was devoted to philosophy, and loved to hear the Stoics[36] and Epicureans expound their varying systems of the cosmos. At this moment she was feasting her soul on Plato. Pisander was reading from the "Phaidros," "They might ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... methods, and is adequately acquainted with the languages and literature of Europe, is infrequently an admirer of the peculiar literature of his own country. Possibly it suffers by comparison. Japan has produced no Dante, or Shakespeare, or Milton. The moods of her people, and probably the limitations and peculiarities of the language, have prevented the possibility of the appearance of such divine geniuses. There is, its critics declare, an absence of sustained power ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... of Dante. Five vols. Illustrated. Student's edition, 50 cts. per vol. Library edition, ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... 'No, Dante's, and the proper Beatrice has got ill, and they have chosen me, partly because I am the same height, and so her clothes will fit me, and partly because they say my face suits, though I don't think I am a bit Italian-looking. ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... sympathy of the angels, the expression of lovers who meet, the child that at the sound of the trumpet clings to the mother's breast, are so natural and beautiful that one believes one's self to be among those who are waiting for judgment. Michael Angelo has expressed in colors what Dante saw and has sung to the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... classes in Sassari, are described as entirely frivolous, and the bent of the bourgeoisie as eminently sordid. It was, therefore, with an agreeable surprise, that we found ourselves in a studio embellished with the portraits of such characters as Dante, Ariosto, and Sir Isaac Newton; and where mathematical instruments, scattered about, and a cabinet containing some of the best French, English, German, and Italian authors, gave a pleasing idea of the tastes of the owner. With imperfect aid he had made himself ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Italian, than a policeman appeared, and he too, chattering at an incredible rate in Italian, disappeared behind the screen. A fearsome altercation was now developing behind the screen in the tongue of Dante, and from time to time one or other of the characters—the lady, the policeman, the first or second gentleman, the waiter—came from cover into view of the audience, and harangued the rest at an incredible rate in Italian. Then a disaster happened behind the screen: a table was upset, ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... gentleman and of ancient lineage, refugee and established in Provence, but of Italian origin: the progenitors were Tuscan. The family was one of those whom Florence had cast from her bosom in the stormy excesses of her liberty, and for which Dante reproaches his country in such bitter strains for her exiles and persecutions. The blood of Machiavel and the earthquake genius of the Italian republics were characteristics of all the individuals of this race. The proportions of their souls ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... bad enough, but from Levick's description it looked, when the moon was shining through storm cloud, like an inferno, with its lugubrious ridges, its inky shadows, and wicked ice-gleams. The odd figures of the blubber-smeared, grimy men added the Dante touch. ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... argument. He gives us the real thing, as he would have been proud to assure us. But poetry will have nothing to do with real things, until it has translated them into a diviner world. That world may be as closely the pattern of ours as the worlds which Dante saw in hell and purgatory; the language of the poet may be as close to the language of daily speech as the supreme poetic language of Dante. But the personal or human reality and the imaginative or divine reality must be perfectly interfused, or the art will be at fault. ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... is because Uncle Edward is happily the king of the parish,' said Elizabeth; 'it has the proper Church and State government, like Dante's notion of the Empire. But you cannot help the rest; and we are still worse off, and how can we expect the children to turn out well with ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... constant expression in the writings of the Italian poet Dante. He was a native of Florence, but passed much of his life in exile. Dante's most famous work, the Divine Comedy, describes an imaginary visit to the other world. Vergil guides him through the realms of Hell and Purgatory until he meets his lady Beatrice, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... sunlight played brightly over all things without fastidious discrimination. There was a rich, and healthy humanity about him which manifested itself in an impartial, all-embracing delight in the glow and color of mere sensuous existence. There has scarcely ever been a great poet (Dante perhaps excepted) who has not had his share of this pagan joy in nudity. Goethe's "Roman Elegies" are undisguisedly Anacreontic, and the most spiritual of modern poets, Robert Browning, is as deep and varied and bountiful in the expression he gives to life ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... be first of the living poets,—are instances of the wide range of the spirit of poetry. Shall we, who have seen Byron writing, as it were, in the midst of us, yield assent to calling Greece and Italy the countries of imagination, par excellence, because they have produced Homer and Dante? Assuredly not. We cannot even admit, as a general proposition, that the languages of the south are always the smoothest and most melodious, and the northern ones harsh, and not adapted for music. The liquid, smooth, and effeminate language of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... tell," she said. "Only my arm is bad right up to the shoulder, and the doctor is putting things on the wound so that it sha'n't leave off hurting night or day. I dreamt I was Dante last night. But no, I won't tell you about that. It was too horrible. I've never been really sick before, Jack. It frightens me some. I sent for you because I felt I wanted—a friend to talk to. It ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... irretrievable ruin. Perhaps it is because women must feel most acutely that society never permits them to retrieve, or, what is much the same, takes no cognisance of their repentance, be it ever so sincere: their station once lost is never to be regained; it would seem as if Dante's inscription on the gates of Hell were to be for ever their motto—"All hope abandon." Man may err, and err, and be forgiven; but poor woman, with all his temptations and but half his strength, is placed beyond the pale of earthly salvation if she be ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... almost certainly the original home of the sonnet (sonnetItal. sonetto, a little sound, or short strain, from suono, sound), and there it has been assiduously cultivated since the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth century Dante and Petrarch gave the ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... side we saw, close to us, the Fiesole of antiquity and of Milton, the site of the Boccaccio-house before mentioned; still closer, the Decameron's Valley of Ladies at our feet; and we looked over toward the quarter of the Mignone and of a house of Dante, and in the distance beheld the mountains of Pistria. Lastly, from the terrace in front, Florence lay clear and cathedraled before us, with the scene of Redi's Bacchus rising on the other side of ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... Hindu, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, or Latin, was as useful then. Dante fed on the troubadours. They are lost and forgot. He divinely stands greater than the tallest of them all. In a measure the same may be true of those from whom the Gospels came. Yet with a very notable difference. The Divina Commedia was written for all time. So too were ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... Dante, Jacopo, son of the poet, was visited in a dream by his father, who conversed with him and told him where to find the missing ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... present becomes unreal and dreamlike, and the vista of his earthly future narrows and closes in upon him. At last, if he live long enough, life comes to be little more than a gentle and peaceful delirium of pleasing recollections. To say, as Dante says, that there is no greater grief than to remember past happiness in the hour of misery is not giving the whole truth. In the midst of the misery, as many would call it, of extreme old age, there is often a divine consolation in recalling the happy moments and days and years of times long ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... insignificant: their very existence is a state of direct enmity and warfare against his. In good truth one might smile at the unbelievers whose imagination is too barren for ghosts and fearful goblins, and such births of night as we see in sickness, to grow up in it, or who stare and marvel at Dante's descriptions; when the commonest everyday life is perpetually paralysing our eyesight with some of these portentous distorted masterpieces among the works of horrour. Yet how can we have a real feeling and love for beauty, without ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... in comparing Milton's Satan with Dante's, somewhere remarks that the vagueness of Milton, as compared with the accurate measurements given by Dante, is so far a proof of less activity of the imaginative faculty. It is easier to leave the devil's stature ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... enrolled among the prophets. The Aeneid was regarded as a Sibylline book and included in the liturgy. Pilgrimages were made to the poet's tomb. And later on he was raised to the rank of a saint by Dante. ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... know, the lovely Beatrice of Dante was only a Disagreeable Girl, clothed in a poet's fancy, and idealized by a dreamer. Fortunate was Dante that he worshipped her afar, that he never knew her well enough to be undeceived, and so walked through life in love with ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... readers, or perhaps despises them too much. He will not condescend to explanation if you do not catch his drift at half a word. He is so desirous to round off his transitions gracefully, that he obliterates the necessary indications of the main divisions of the subject. When criticising Milton or Dante, he can hardly keep his hand off the finest passages in his desire to pare away superfluities. Treating himself in the same fashion, he leaves none of those little signs which, like the typographical hand prefixed to a notice, are extremely convenient, though strictly superfluous. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... peculiar appearance. It was most appropriately compared to a temple. High glass cases around the walls contained the works of Voltaire, Racine, Moliere, and Corneille; those of Homer, Caesar, Cicero, and Ovid; also the Italian poets Dante, Petrarch, and Machiavel. All that had a good name in the literary world found its way into the library of the royal prince—all, excepting the works ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... lost all semblance of regularity, for in the thousand years since the hand of man had pruned or cared for it Mother Nature had planted and replanted it times beyond counting. Small and gnarled and crooked the trees were, as the spine-tree souls in Dante's dolorosa selva. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... from its trance, into new life and motion. The elements of poetry had been accumulating in secret. The renovation of letters merely opened a passage for what had been struggling for vent. What is Dante's work but a beautiful incarnation of the spirit of the Middle Ages? His passion is that of a sublimated Inquisitor. His "Inferno" is such a dream as might have been dreamed by a poet monk, whose body had been macerated by austerities, and whose spirit ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... to teach him a few niceties and idioms, and make him look out for differences of style and language. But we begin at the wrong end, and store his memory with exceptions and idioms and niceties first. No sensible human being who wanted, let us say, to know enough Italian to read Dante, would dream of setting to work as we set to work on classics. Well then," Father Payne went on, "I should cultivate the imagination of children a great deal more. I should try to teach them all I could about the world as it is—the ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... which a man may derive from books with the inconveniences to which he may be put by his acquaintances. "Plato," he says, "is never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of political opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can excite the horror of Bossuet." I dare say I might differ from Lord Macaulay in my estimate of some of the writers he has named, but there can be no disputing his main proposition, namely, ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... plenty of it, we passed between the advanced frigates like an arrow. It seemed to me like entering the gates of hell. As we flew rapidly along, and our own ships disappeared in the intense darkness, I thought of Dante's inscription over the portals:—"You who ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... woodcutters, who have always some trouble on hand amongst themselves or with their neighbours. When I leave the wood, I go to a spring, and thence to the place which I use for snaring birds, with a book under my arm—Dante or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets, like Tibullus or Ovid. I read the story of their passions, and let their loves remind me of my own, which is a pleasant pastime for a while. Next I take the road, enter ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... the canny custom of writers on travel bent to defray the expense of their journeyings by dashing off tales filled with foreign flavour. Dickens did it, and Dante. It has been tried all the way from Tasso to Twain; from Raskin to Roosevelt. A pleasing custom it is and thrifty withal, and one that has saved many a one but poorly prepared for the European robber in uniform the moist and ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... every city who tell us they are guided by Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Luther, Tennyson or Henry Ward Beecher. So we are led to believe that the chief business of great men in the spiritual realm is to guide commonplace men in this, and cause them to take ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... delicate austerities of art: The clear compulsions of the sovran mind Constrain the dreamy panics of my heart. Plato and Dante, Petrarch, Lancelot, Revealed me very Love, flame-clad, august. Also I strove to be as we are not, Loyal, and honourable, and even just. My webs of life in reveries were dyed As veils in vats of purple: ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... mourned. Her tomb bore no long-winded panegyric. Her name only, her parentage and birthplace—for she was Italian to the last, and her husband loved her the better for it—the dates of her birth and death, and then two lines from Dante's Vita Nuova. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... manuscripts were a copy of Dante, with a commentary by Joannes de Sarravalle, written in the years 1416-17, which sold for one hundred and fifty-one pounds; and a very beautiful Roman Breviary of the beginning of the sixteenth century, on vellum, illuminated ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can. He may go beyond that zone; but then he has only two directions in which he can travel. Above it there is religion, and an artist may, like Dante, succeed in transforming love into a sentiment of religious ecstasy. I do not think that any artist could do that to-day; this is not an age of religious ecstasy. But upwards there is no other way to go. Downwards the artist may travel ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... doom of far unhappy Siberian plains. More than ever that day the suburb had oppressed him; insignificant, detestable, repulsive to body and mind, it was the only hell that a vulgar age could conceive or make, an inferno created not by Dante but by the jerry-builder. He had gone out to the north, and when he lifted up his eyes again he found that he had chanced to turn up by one of the little lanes that still strayed across the broken fields. He had never chosen this path before because ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... period five or six poets equal to the production of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Great poets appeared at long intervals. As he reckoned them, there had been but six given to the world—Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Sophocles and AEschylus. With the exception of the last two, there had been great spaces of time between these. Could it be supposed that at the very dawn of history there was a group, as it were, of men each in the highest degree gifted with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... who has turned over old volumes of sermons, adorned with the authors' portraits, must have been struck with the length of their faces. They seem to say—parodying the famous line of Dante—"Abandon jokes all ye who enter here." Those men preached a solemnly absurd creed, and they looked absurdly solemn. Their faces seemed as devoid of merriment as the faces of jackasses, and the heads above them were often as stupid. Justice forbid that I should run down a Hooker, a Barrow, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... the age, and if the classic writers held the first place in his estimation—as naturally they would—he assuredly did not neglect the firstfruits of modern literature. Pulci was his favourite poet. He evidently knew Dante and Boccaccio well, and his literary insight was clear enough to perceive that the future belonged to those who should write in the vulgar tongue of the lands ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... man who violates the laws decreed by the State to regulate the relations between its citizens, but the voluminous codes which in past times set forth these laws treat only of crime, never of the criminal. That ignoble multitude whom Dante relegated to the Infernal Regions were consigned by magistrates and judges to the care of gaolers and executioners, who alone deigned to deal with them. The judge, immovable in his doctrine, unshaken ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... at children's fancies about "ghosts" and "bogie," but Dante's terrors in the haunted wood were not greater or more real than poor little Olive's, when she stood at the entrance of the long gallery, dimly peopled with the fantastic shadows of dawn. None but those who remember the fearful imaginings of their childhood, can comprehend ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... book,' Jean said, looking at Miss Levering over the top of the telegraph form, and then glancing at the title as she restored the volume to its owner. 'Dante! Whereabouts are you?' She opened it without waiting to hear. ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... Ursachenthier, is born to be on the whole equally happy and miserable. The highest organisms, the fine porcelain of our family, enjoy the most and suffer the most: they have a capacity for rising to the empyrean of pleasure and for plunging deep into the swift-flowing river of woe and pain. Thus Dante ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... From the terrace walk on the left we may look over the wall to the eastern gardens and park; along the right-hand terrace is formed Queen Mary's Bower, an intertwisted avenue of trimmed and cut wych-elms, some of the distorted trunks of which might have inspired more than one of Dore's Dante illustrations. This shady bower is in summer particularly delightful, and from the farther end of it is to be had, through and above the evergreens of this Privy Garden, a beautiful view of the south front of the Palace. At the farther end of ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... by virtue of her godlike genius takes her seat with HOMER, DANTE, SHAKSPEAKE and MARIE CORELLI, and a novel such as the world has not known since The Miseries of Mephistopheles startled the comatose mid-Victorians from their slumbers—both stand revealed in these soul-shaking pages. To say that this is the novel of the year is ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... Earth to witness that we have produced nothing at all.... He that accuses us of producing, let him show himself. Let him say what and when." And he never wrote so sternly and justly as when he compared the "divine sorrow" of Dante with the "undivine sorrow" of Utilitarianism, which had already come down to talking about the breeding of the poor and to hinting at infanticide. This is a representative quarrel; for if the Utilitarian spirit reached its highest point in Mill, it certainly ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... words, puritanic consistency, silent fortitude, are but so many vigorous outlines, and impress us by virtue of the same colorless intensity as a masterpiece of the statuary. How sculpturesque is Dante, even in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... concerned—come at reality generally through material form. But don't they come at it sometimes through imagined form? And ought we not to add that sometimes the sense of reality comes we know not whence? The best account I know of this state of being rapt in a mysterious sense of reality is the one that Dante gives: ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... the wise proprietor knows, enjoys most what he understands best. The plain people are not necessarily the unintelligent ones, for the working man can both understand and enjoy pictured versions of Dante's Inferno and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, but he will feel more at home while watching a picture of contemporary American life; and who shall say, provided the photoplay be a good one, that he is not receiving as much profit therefrom as from the film ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... misery to recall past misery—almost as bitter, for all Dante's cry, as to dwell on past happiness. But, be the past really dead, and a new and better life begun, the scanning back of a sombre existence done with for ever, may bring with it a kind of ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... hour they strangled him. But this triumph was not of long duration. Scarcely had the sun achieved this victory when his bark was borne by the tide into the realm of the night hours, and from that moment he was assailed, like Virgil and Dante at the Gates of Hell, by frightful sounds and clamourings. Each circle had its voice, not to be confounded with the voices of other circles. Here the sound was as an immense humming of wasps; yonder it was as the lamentations of women for their husbands, and ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... frequent repetition. "This question was a complete baffler" is too much like slang to be admitted into the good company which Mr. Parton's sentences usually keep. We were not aware that "Physician, heal thyself" was a stock classical allusion. We do not believe—for Dante and Milton would rise up in judgment against us, even if the vast majority of other great men did not—that "it is only second-rate men who have great aims." We do not believe that the style of the "Spectator" is an "easily imitated style"; for, of the hundreds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... and poetry are written in Irish, and shall we, who learn Italian, and Latin, and Greek, to read Dante, Livy, and Homer in the original—shall we be content with ignorance or a ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... fourteenth century is pre-eminently the age of thought. It begins with the first words of the poem of Dante; and all the great pictorial poems—the mighty series of works in which everything is done to relate, but nothing to imitate—belong to this century. I should only confuse you by giving you the names of marvelous artists, most of them little familiar ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... with it his influence, must soon come to an end; whence it happens that a kingdom which rests wholly on the qualities of its prince, lasts for a brief time only; because these qualities, terminating with his life, are rarely renewed in his successor. For as Dante wisely says:— ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... science is facing it valiantly now. Therefore natural Theology may face it likewise. Remember Carlyle's great words about poor Francesca in the Inferno: "Infinite pity: yet also infinite rigour of law. It is so Nature is made. It is so Dante discerned that ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... attention; and no passages in any work with which we are acquainted are more worthless and puerile. In our time they would scarcely obtain admittance into the literary department of the Morning Post. Every reader of the Divine Comedy must be struck by the veneration which Dante expresses for writers far inferior to himself. He will not lift up his eyes from the ground in the presence of Brunetto, all whose works are not worth the worst of his own hundred cantos. He does not venture to walk in the same line ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Raffaelle get his reputation? It may be answered, How did Virgil get his? or Dante? or Bacon? or Plato? or Mendelssohn? or a score of others who not only get the public ear but keep it sometimes for centuries? How did Guido, Guercino and Domenichino get their reputations? A hundred years ago these men were held as hardly inferior to ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... that they do not interrupt your studies." Though they flutter off the next moment, to carry their impertinences to the nearest student that they can call their friend, the tone of the book is spoiled; we shut the leaves, and, with Dante's lovers, read no more that day. It were well if the effect of intrusion were simply co-extensive with its presence; but it mars all the good hours afterwards. These scratches in appearance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... you to look beautiful. I want people to see in your eyes that you were married to me. The people in Italy used to point at Dante and say "There goes the man who has been in hell." I want them to point at you and say "There goes a woman who has been in heaven." It has ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... spiritual. The Great War proved that humanity must progress upward toward higher ideals; but then appeared that Curse which was seen and felt by Christ, the Apostle John, Buddha, the first Christian martyrs, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe and Dostoyevsky. It appeared, turned back the wheel of progress and blocked our road to the Divinity. Revolution is an infectious disease and Europe making the treaty with Moscow deceived itself and ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... profane; I, who have trod where seraphs fear to tread; I, who on mount—no, "honey-dew" have fed; I, who undaunted broke the mystic seal, And left no page for prophets to reveal; I, who in shade portentous Dante threw; I, who have done what Milton dared not do,— I fear no rival for the vacant throne; No mortal thunder shall ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... paid, in act, what he considered a dutiful attention to the bond; his thoughts travelled elsewhere; and while forming a high ideal of the companionship of minds in marriage, he seems never to have doubted that its realization must be postponed to some other state of being. Dante, almost immediately after the death of Beatrice, married a lady chosen for him by his friends, and Boccaccio, in describing the miseries that attended, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... society, provided all professional men were rigorously excluded. As for the old masters, the better plan would be never even to look at one of them, and to consign Raffaelle, along with Plato, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Dante, Goethe, and two others, neither of them Englishmen, to limbo, as the Seven Humbugs ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler |
