"Dante" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... entirely arrest the development of the disease. Prevention here is not only better than cure, but often all that is possible. Those in whom the disease has become active, must too often, like those who entered Dante's infernal regions, 'abandon hope.' Let our words of caution therefore ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... plateau. It was bowl-shaped and at the bottom, some hundreds of yards from where we lay, were pools of green-scummed, stagnant water, fringed with bullrushes. It was a weird place in itself, but its occupants made it seem like a scene from the Seven Circles of Dante. The place was a rookery of pterodactyls. There were hundreds of them congregated within view. All the bottom area round the water-edge was alive with their young ones, and with hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs. From this crawling flapping mass of obscene ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... beauty with their envious shrouds, Hiding her glorious, most majestic mien. There was a depth of silence in the night— A mist of melancholy in the air— And the capricious beams of Dian's light Gave something mystic to the scene most fair. I gave my cousin Dante's divine "Inferno," Imploring her to read il primo canto. "Lo giorno s'andava," she drawled; but, tired of plodding, Directly fell asleep, and pretty soon—was nodding!! "Cousin, sweet cousin," cried I out, "awake! I long for sympathy—compassion on me take: They say yon stars ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... Keyser, he lived a long time in Paris, won many medals and other honours, and died in 1888, leaving behind him numerous pictures, several of which are reproduced in this book. His "Erasmus Reading to the Young Charles V." is in the Luxembourg, and the Brussels museum has his "Dante at Ravenna," and the "Entry of Albert and Isabella into Ostend." Besides these he produced "The Mass of Adrien Willaert," "The Childhood of Montaigne," "Shakespeare and his Family," "Vesalius," "Hamlet," and "Murillo in his Studio." One of his paintings, entitled "The Women ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... facility" cannot be applied to so consummate a draughtsman as the illustrator of Dante, Cervantes and Victor Hugo. But Dore's almost superhuman memory was no less of a pitfall than manual dexterity. The following story will partly explain his dislike ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... 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 ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... Legion, fully understanding the beauty of his position, replied, with a sly twinkle of the eye, "We didn't engage to 'list at all, at all, but to wurruk on the railroad." Upon which Sir John Gaspard, seeing that Her Majesty had been imposed upon, politely told the legion to go to——Dante's Inferno. ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... was the table that held her MSS. and a few books, amidst which were scattered vases of flowers. On a pedestal beneath the window was placed a marble bust of Dante. Through the open door were seen in perspective two rooms just deserted by her guests; the lights still burned in the chandeliers and girandoles, contending with the daylight that came through the half-closed curtains. The person of the inmate was in harmony with the apartment. It was characterised ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... world now looks back as forming the diadem by virtue of which Italy claims to have led the van of modern European civilization, but who in their own estimation belonged wholly and exclusively to their own city. If Dante, the range of whose intellectual sympathies can hardly be deemed a narrow one—Dante the exile, whose chequered life made him the denizen of so many foreign homes—could speak of the degeneration ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... her, which, when she communicated it to him, fired the imagination of Powers and turned out a great success. This was nothing less than to give a representation of some of the more striking scenes of Dante's Divina Commedia. The idea was a sufficiently audacious one. But "audaces Fortuna juvat." Powers scouted the notion of difficulty. My mother was to draw up the programme, and he undertook, with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... but there is much difference between me and this Dante. He fled from country because he had one bad tongue which he shook at his betters. I fly because benefice gone, and head going; not on account of the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the purity and ideality of religious worship. To so high a degree is this the case that it is sometimes difficult to be sure whether we are concerned with a real maiden of flesh and blood or only a poetic symbol of womanhood. This doubt has been raised, notably by Bartoli, concerning Dante's Beatrice, the supreme type of this ethereal love, which arose in the thirteenth century, and was chiefly cultivated in Florence. The poets of this movement were themselves aware of the religious character of their devotion to the donna angelicata to whom they even apply, as they would ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... river-brink. He was all the while unconsciously continuing the low-toned chant which had haunted his throat all the way up the river—the gondolier's song in the "Otello," where Rossini has worthily set to music the immortal words of Dante— ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Italy who tried to blow,[9] Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song, In his light youth amid a festal throng Sate with his bride to ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... sea shall thy own death come," suggesting that Ulysses after all was lost at sea. This is the rendering followed by Tennyson in his poem "Ulysses" (and see Dante, Inferno, Canto xxvi.). It is a more natural translation of the Greek, and gives a far more wonderful vista for the close of the ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... infinitely unhappy and infinitely abused. Against the dark background of the abominations committed by harsh rulers and worthless officials, the spectacle of these simple souls recalls those angels described by Dante, who give scarcely a sign of life and yet illuminate by their very presence the fearful darkness of hell; or those beautiful Greek sarcophagi upon which fair and graceful scenes are depicted upon a background ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... what an amount of affectation mingles with criticism even of the highest pretensions. It is no wonder, then, that common readers should be mistaken in their book-worship. To such persons, for all their blind reverence, Dante must in reality be a wild beast—a fine animal, it is true, but still a wild beast—and our own Milton a polemical pedant arguing by the light of poetry. To such readers, the spectacle of Ugolino devouring the head of Ruggieri, and wiping his jaws with the hair that he might tell his story, cannot ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... of the literature of the middle ages culminates in the Christian poet, Dante. History, theology, politics, paganism, sweet and melancholy elegies, flashes of fiery indignation, all men and all generations, meet in his majestic epic. Yet the closest unity is preserved through this astonishing range of subjects; one sublime ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... shot. Above it, behold the Archbishop's most fatherly of rebukes, And beneath, with his crown and his lion, some little new law of the Duke's! Or a sonnet with flowery marge, to the Reverend Don So-and-so, Who is Dante, deg. Boccaccio, deg. Petrarca, deg. St. Jerome deg. and Cicero, deg. deg.48 "And moreover" (the sonnet goes rhyming), "the skirts of St. Paul has reached, deg. deg.49 Having preached us those six Lent-lectures more unctuous than ever he preached." ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... do you know about the higher poetics? I defy you to find such sublimities either in Milton or Dante." ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... deeper into this ulcered area. During heavy bombardment and attacks I have seen shells falling like rain. The countless towers of smoke remind one of Gustave Dore's picture of the fiery tombs of the arch-heretics in Dante's "Hell." A smoky pall covers the sector under fire, rising so high that at a height of one thousand feet one is enveloped in its mist-like fumes. Now and then monster projectiles hurtling through the air close by leave one's plane rocking violently in their wake. Airplanes ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... build elegant pavilions, or lay out labyrinths and lakes in her garden. Bellincioni and a dozen other poets celebrated her name and recorded her words and actions in verse; learned scholars and commentators read Dante to her when she cared to listen. Niccolo da Correggio not only wrote sonnets and canzoni for her to sing but invented new patterns for her gowns; and Cristoforo Romano laid down the sculptor's chisel to play the lyre or viol for her pleasure. For her the wise man of Pavia, Lorenzo Gusnasco, fashioned ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... she certainly looked more of a Fate than a Muse. Her expression was not agreeable. The poet, afterwards describing the incident and remembering his Dante, spoke of her in an allegorical sonnet as 'lady of terrible aspect,' and symbolised her ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... to the use of the words "Nos zelo fidei catholicae, cujus sumus et erimus Deo dante Defensores, salubriter commoti" in the charter of Richard II. to the Chancellor of Oxford, in the nineteenth year of his reign, as the earliest introduction of such phrases into acts of the kings of England that he had met with. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... Europe, 1851-1852, with his wife, whose health was then precarious, stimulated his scholarly interests, and gave substance to his study of Dante and Italian literature. In October, 1853, his wife died; she had borne him three children: the first-born, Blanche, died in infancy; the second, Walter, also died young; the third, a daughter, Mrs. Burnett, survived ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... little more than 5800 years old, should come down upon me, and, after pouring upon my humble self their most damning anathemas, consign me, at the dictates of their sectarian charity, to that place over the door of which Dante read,— ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... men would be killed, and so on. I would like to know if all that does not apply to war as well as to revolution? One word more, and I shall have done. I have been found guilty of treason or treason-felony. Treason is a foul crime. The poet Dante consigned traitors to, I believe, the ninth circle of hell; but what kind of traitors? Traitors against king, against country, against friends and benefactors. England is not my country; I have betrayed no friend, no benefactor. Sidney and Emmet were ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... some future day, and therefore feared that if married it might militate against it. He hoped, also, to be able to get Clotelle away too, and it was this hope that kept him from trying to escape by himself. Dante did not more love his Beatrice, Swift his Stella, Waller his Saccharissa, Goldsmith his Jessamy bride, or Burns his Mary, than did Jerome his Clotelle. Unknown to her father, Miss Wilson could permit these two slaves ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... chief of the great Governments. Gay designation? In the house, in our three curule chairs, we sat and looked on. On our left a little group of the family. In front of us, at our feet, an ancient Talking-man, crowned with green leaves, his profile almost exactly Dante's; Popo his name. He had worshipped idols in his youth; he had been full grown before the first missionary came hither from Tahiti; this makes him over eighty. Near by him sat his son and colleague. In the group on our left, his little grandchild ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the former, it would seem, endeavours to express objective emotions and subjects in music. I do not see why music should not follow poetry in getting away from introspection and trying to paint the drama of the universe. Shakespeare is as good as Dante. Besides, one may add, it is always Berlioz himself that is discovered in his music: it is his soul starving for love and mocked at by shadows which is revealed through all ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... bitterest and ablest assailants has pronounced to be, "in point of execution, the sublimest poetical achievement of mortal pen," we have, in a similar strain of strength and splendour, the Prophecy of Dante, Cain, the Mystery of Heaven and Earth, Sardanapalus,—all produced during this wonderful period of his genius. To these also are to be added four other dramatic pieces, which, though the least successful of his compositions, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... against the vaults of cathedrals, were leaving the nest for the first time. We cannot think that a day will come when they will fold their wings and fall silent. Since human bodies, temples of the Holy Ghost, will live again in glory, one would like to believe with Dante that the hymns, temples of the Word, are likewise immortal, and that they will still be heard in the everlasting. Doubtless in the twilight glens of Purgatory the bewailing souls continue to sing ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... remind one of Dante's descriptions of the 'Entrance into the Infernal Regions,' does it not?" inquired ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... at his words and manner. "It would take me until to-morrow to name all the great men I have ever heard of. I suppose you have heard the names of Napoleon, Wellington, Nelson, Dante, ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... will you accuse us of overproduction? We take the Heavens and the 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 ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... wholly passed from the acquaintance of men. The rude force and beauty of mediaeval fiction has been deeply felt by many of the greatest minds which have contributed to modern literature. To the perusal of the story of Launcelot and Guenever Dante ascribes the coming of Paolo and Francesca al doloroso passo. While the other works of Ariosto have fallen into obscurity, his "Orlando Furioso" has achieved a lasting fame. One of the greatest poems in the German language, the "Oberon" of Wieland, is almost ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... could trace the likeness of men so accurately that a physiognomist could discover the ruling passion to which they were subject. Dante's characters, in his view of Purgatory, are drawn with accurate reference to the principles of physiognomy; and Shakspeare and Sterne, particularly the latter, were clever in the art; while Kempf and Zimmermann, in their profession, are said seldom ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... good companionship and ready wit. He was, in fact, a pleasant companion, fond of a good story, fonder still of his dog and gun, fondest of all of talking about poetry and reciting verses, which he could do by the hour,—sometimes repeating whole pages from Dante or Petrarch or Tasso or his favorite of all, Alfieri,—and sometimes extemporizing sonnets, or terzine, or odes, with that wonderful facility which Nature has given to the Italian improvvisatore and denied to the rest of mankind. It has often been remarked ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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 it, and the villa of Arcetri, famous for Galileo. Hazlitt, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... 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 this ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the noblest uses. That there was another side to the matter goes without saying. This passion, like any other, has its depths, as well as its heights; and the ideal of friendship conceived by Plato was as remote, perhaps, from the experience of the average man, as Dante's presentation of the love between man and woman. Still, the fact remains that it was friendship of this kind that supplied to the Greek that element of romance which plays so large a part in modern life; and it is to this, and not to the relations between ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... a drop of water, the devouring worm, all the tortures of the guilty and the somewhat insipid pleasures of the just, reminds one of the scenes in the under world so vividly described by Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Yama is defeated (Sect. XXVI.) by the giant, not so much by his superior power as because at the request of Brahma Yama refrains from smiting with his deadly weapon the Rakshas enemy to whom that God had once given the promise that preserved him. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... as Dante has told us that the devils laugh at the sight of the torture of the damned. Marguerite had thought that by now she had lived through the whole gamut of horror and anguish that human heart could bear; yet now, when Desgas ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the following persons stand for in human progress: Dante, Savonarola, Charlemagne, John Scotus Erigena, Thomas Aquinas, Abelard, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Entente, the declarations of Wilson's principles, or points, became so contorted that no trace of them could be found in the treaties, save for that ironic covenant of the League of Nations, which is always repeated on the front page, as Dante said of the rule of St. Benedict, at the ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... 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 ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Milton has been greatly hampered by the self-inflicted laws under which he labored, conditions which did not affect Dante and Tasso, who were his models; for Milton denied in a great measure the use of history, tradition and symbolism. Of this defect he was sensible, so he tried to make amends for it by borrowing fables and allegories out of the Koran and Talmud. English poetry has inclined more to the style of ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... from a beautiful woman and makes the touch of her hand a religious ecstasy, and her very garments a thrilling mystery. How impossible it is to imagine a woman writing the Vita Nuova, or a girl feeling toward a boy such feelings of awe and worship as set the boy Dante a-tremble at his first sight of ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... creatures — it was as though all the most evil passions and desires of man had got into the shell of a magnified crab and gone mad. They were so dreadfully courageous and intelligent, and they looked as if they understood. The whole scene might have furnished material for another canto of Dante's ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... greatest and most trying task of all poets to depict that which really depends for its charm on association, emotion and a chiaroscuro of the feelings. We have all delightful reminiscences which make ridiculous Dante's assertion that ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... there was born in the city of Florence in Italy a man who was destined to become one of the four greatest poets that the world has ever produced. This man was Dante, the son of Alighiero, a Florentine who was popular and well known ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... Poynter has sent any of the pictures on which his fame rests; neither Burne-Jones nor Watts shows us here all the glories of his art; and the name of that strange genius who wrote the Vision of Love revealed in Sleep, and the names of Dante Rossetti and of the Marchioness of Waterford, cannot be found in the catalogue. And so it is to be hoped that this is not the only exhibition of paintings that we shall see in the Grosvenor Gallery; and Sir Coutts Lindsay, in showing us great works of art, will ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... is a more recent travesty of the well-known scene in Dante's Inferno where Bertrand de Born, a noted sower of sedition, comes forth with his severed head in his hands. In the Russian version the renowned editor of the Moscow Gazette is seen hobbling along with a cannon-ball labelled "Police Surveillance" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... is the very hero that a wondering and waiting audience would be satisfied to see appearing upon such a stage. Except Dante on his background of Heaven and Hell, and Byron on his background of Europe and Time, no writer had in one book placed himself with greater distinction before the world. His glory was threefold. He was the man ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... eternal justice, the dumb will speak as they desire, and sing wondrous songs with the angels; the sorrowful will again be happy there. We will hope, we will both hope! Do you remember how I read Dante aloud to you, and tried to explain his divine creation, as we sat on the bench by the fig-tree. The sea roared below us, and our hearts swelled higher than its storm-lashed waves. How soft was the air, how bright the sunshine! This earth seemed doubly beautiful to you ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... church's workers, the mere runners of her machinery," says Bishop Brooks, "have always been strictly and scrupulously orthodox; while all the church's noblest servants, they who have opened to her new heavens of vision and new domains of work,—Paul, Origen, Tertullian, Dante, Abelard, Luther, Milton, Coleridge, Maurice, Swedenborg, Martineau,—have again and again been persecuted for being ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... voice faltered, he could not continue without emotion the touching tale of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. Amelie's eyes were suffused with tears of pity, for her heart had beat time to the music of Dante's immortal verse as it dropped in measured cadence from the lips ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... symphonies mean much in their application to the common life of humanity. Knowing them even approximately, we often find texts which illumine them in the writings of men who went below the surface of things, Emerson, or Carlyle, or Schopenhauer. Thus Carlyle, writing on Dante says: "He has opened the deep unfathomable oasis of woe that lay in the soul of man; he has opened the living fountains of hope, also of penitence." Does not the mind instantly revert to the C ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... occasional, and the most of his time was devoted to his Parliamentary duties and study. His constant companions were Homer and Dante, and he at this time, it is recorded, read the whole of St. Augustine, in twenty-two octavo volumes. He was a constant attendant upon public worship at St. James', Piccadilly, and Margaret Chapel, and a careful critic of sermons. At the same time he diligently ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... written of himself. It is sixty-five years since Lowell was appointed to his professorship at Harvard, and during this long period erudition has not been idle here. It is quite possible that the University possesses to-day a better Dante scholar than Lowell, a better scholar in Old French, a better Chaucer scholar, a better Shakespeare scholar. But it is certain that if our Division of Modern Languages were called upon to produce a volume of essays matching in human interest one of Lowell's volumes drawn ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... spirituous liquors. Everything stimulating was vigorously denied me; and there came on the drunkard's remorseless torture: delirium tremens, in all its terrors, attacked me. For three days I endured more agony than pen could describe, even were it guided by the mind of Dante. Who can feel the horrors of the horrible malady, aggravated as it is by the almost ever-abiding consciousness that it is self-sought. Hideous faces appeared on the wall and on the ceiling and on the floors; foul things crept along ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... to actuate its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange, ineluctable, fatal daily round. Such as these was the water-lily, and also like one of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who would have inquired of them at greater length and in fuller detail from the victims themselves, had not Virgil, striding on ahead, obliged him to hasten after him at full speed, as I must hasten ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Milton, he could not have introduced all the numerous topics which have their place in his essay of one hundred pages. He might have mentioned Milton's poetry and his character, the two main divisions of the present essay; but Dante and Aeschylus, Puritan and Royalist, would scarcely have received notice. The second consideration in selecting material is the purpose and length of the essay, and the consequent thoroughness with which the subject is ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... trovigxas pli de Esperantistoj, kiuj parolas la lingvon de Dante, ol tiun de Cervantes, kaj, eble, frazo en la Itala lingvo ankaux estos komprenebla por tiuj el miaj legantoj, kiuj tute ne komprenas tiun cxi belan sudan lingvon. Ni legu eltirajxon el "Malta," skribita de la tiea sindonema Sinjoro Dominic Ciantar. ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 4 • Various
... of scientific apparatus,—not of the order employed by the judges of Galileo,—electric and galvanic batteries, an orrery, and many things beside. The library interests us more, with some luxurious classics, a superb Dante, and a prison-cage of forbidden works, of which Padre Lluc certainly has the key. Among these were fine editions of Rousseau and Voltaire, which appeared to be intended for use; and we could imagine a solitary student, dark-eyed and pale, exploring their depths at midnight with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... as we had under the reign of architecture, Iliads and Romanceros, Mahabahrata, and Nibelungen Lieds, made by a whole people, with rhapsodies piled up and melted together. The great accident of an architect of genius may happen in the twentieth century, like that of Dante in the thirteenth. But architecture will no longer be the social art, the collective art, the dominating art. The grand poem, the grand edifice, the grand work of humanity will no longer be built: it will ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... agitation. I sat musing upon his last Frightful words, which proved to what excess the passions may be carried when escaped from all moral restraint. There was a horrible verity in this story that reminded me of some of the tragic fictions of Dante. ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... still is one of the greatest, of dramatic poets; the Iliad is a tragedy arranged in the garb of an epic poem. AEschylus borrowed, Prometheus-like, the divine fire, and embodied the energy of Dante and the soul of Milton in his sublime tragedies. Sophocles and Euripides were contemporary with Pericles and Phidias; the same age witnessed the Clouds of Aristophanes, the death of Socrates, and the history of Thucydides. The warlike and savage genius ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... surrounding me was literary rather than scientific. I remember reading a translation of Plato that gave me great delight, and being rather annoyed by the insatiable questionings of Socrates. Lord Derby's translation of the Iliad also charmed me with its stateliness and melody, and Dante was another favorite study. Wordsworth and Cowper I much disliked, and into the same category went all the 17th and 18th century "poets," though I read them conscientiously through. Southey fascinated me with his wealth of Oriental fancies, ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... undergone by this body were almost as strange and complete as those which affected the brigands in Dante's Inferno. When first seen, it wore the aspect of a nebula; later it put on the distinctive garb of a comet; it next appeared as a star; finally, it dilated, first in a spherical, then in a paraboloidal form, until May 5, 1836, when it vanished from Herschel's observation at Feldhausen ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... life, or it is one of the most wonderful feats of the poetic imagination. Nothing more terrible, vivid, penetrating, and real was ever conceived by the greatest creative genius. If it is not simply a portrait, Aschylus or Dante might own the artist for a brother. We see the quiet landing on the eastern shore, and almost hear the yells that broke the silence as the fierce, demon-ridden man hurried to meet them, perhaps with hostile purpose. The ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... fine guide, truly! He has had so much experience in aesthetic matters! Or is it metapheesics is his hobby? And what, pray, is his notion as to what life should be? that the noblest object of a man's ambition should be to kill a stag? It was a mistake for Dante to let his work eat into his heart; he should have devoted himself to shooting rabbits. And Raphael—don't you think he would have improved his digestion by giving up pandering to the public taste for pretty things, and taking to hunting wild-boars? that is the theory, isn't it? ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... bagpipes, their buzz filled the air, their shrieks went ringing up to MacGuilp like the cries of Dante's condemned. The duchess found the sound barbarous. MacGuilp opened his window, upon which the pipers strained their lungs for the Signore Inglese, grand amateur of the bagpipes. He begged them to go away. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... scathing thing ever said in literature was said by Robert Buchanan on Dante Gabriel Rossetti's verses—"He has wheeled his nuptial bed into the street." Looking at these letters I have a great shrinking, for they were meant only for the eyes of an aged man for whom I cared enough to let him see behind the curtain. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... with the Dante Alighieri face, guided by the pressure of Sam's knees, bore that wandering minstrel sixteen miles southeastward. Nature was in her most benignant mood. League after league of delicate, sweet flowerets ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... as the words lingered on his lips; then, with a long breath, went on, as if it was hard to lay bare the foolish little romance he had woven about a girl, a picture, and a child's story there in the darkness of the place which was as terrible to him as Dante's Inferno, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... does after a great shock. She understood what bitter tragedies threaten the business man no less than the monarch, the warrior, the poet, and the lover, though there has not been many an AEschylos or Euripides or Dante to make poetry of the Prometheus chained to the rocks of trade with the vulture pay-roll gnawing at his profits; the OEdipos in the factory who sees everything gone horribly awry; or the slow pilgrim through the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... invincible obstacle to his general diffusion. In England, the greatest actors vie with one another in the impersonation of his characters; the printers in splendid editions of his works; and the painters in transferring his scenes to the canvas. Like Dante, Shakespeare has received the perhaps inevitable but still cumbersome honor of being treated like a classical author of antiquity. The oldest editions have been carefully collated, and, where the readings seemed corrupt, many corrections have been ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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 ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... writer who 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 ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... who at the Renaissance brought a new life into the world Plato has had the greatest influence. The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendants. Like Dante or Bunyan, he has a revelation of another life; like Bacon, he is profoundly impressed with the unity of knowledge; in the early Church he exercised a real influence on theology, and at the Revival of Literature on politics. Even the fragments ...
— The Republic • Plato
... shelf, under the picture which had been turned to the wall. He ran over the titles. There were a number of French novels, Ely's Socialism, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, St. Pierre's Paul and Virginia, and a dozen other volumes; there were Balzac and Hugo, and Dante's Divine Comedy. Amid this array, like a black sheep lost among the angels, was a finger-worn and faded little volume bearing the name Camille. Something about this one book, so strangely out of place in its present ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... friendly silence of the moon" the sweet cantilena goes on, now for soprano, now for tenor. The middle piece is of a more dramatic character perhaps. This is followed by an intermezzo, like a quick minuet, which is very successful; and this in turn by a rhapsody, which bears a motto from Dante's "Inferno," "Those who enter here leave hope behind"—surely not a very inviting suggestion to the student who takes it for the first time. Fortunately the period when hope forsakes the reader is short, being ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... wandering among the titles of the books. The library consisted almost entirely of handsome "uniform editions": Irving, Poe, Cooper, Goldsmith, Scott, Byron, Burns, Longfellow, Tennyson, Hume, Gibbon, Prescott, Thackeray, Dickens, De Musset, Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert, Goethe, Schiller, Dante, and Tasso. There were shelves and shelves of encyclopedias, of anthologies, of "famous classics," of "Oriental masterpieces," of "masterpieces of oratory," and more shelves of "selected libraries" ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... editions, on which incredible labour has been lavished, and of which we have no better examples than the prefaces of Bishop Stubbs. An important event in this series was the attack on Dino Compagni, which, for the sake of Dante, roused the best Italian scholars to a not unequal contest. When we are told that England is behind the Continent in critical faculty, we must admit that this is true as to quantity, not as to quality of work. As they are no longer living, I will say of two Cambridge ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... McKenna is tall, with a slender figure, Irish blue eyes, fair hair, regular features and a Dante profile. He has an engaging and very courteous address, a sympathetic manner, a ready but always urbane wit and great conversational charm. He possesses the rare accomplishment of "talking like a book." His intimates are legion; and, apart ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Italy began to produce the inspired artists who broke the bonds of Byzantine traditions and turned back to the inspiration of all art, which is Nature. Giotto, tending his sheep, began to draw pictures of things as he saw them, Savonarola awoke the conscience, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio—a string of names to conjure with—all roused the intellect. The dawn of the Renaissance flushed Europe with the life of civilisation. But before the wonderful development of art through the reversion to classic lines, came a high perfection of the style ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... to the nymph Rhodos, by whom Apollo has the seven sons who teach [Greek: sophotata noemata]; because the rose is the most beautiful organism existing in matter not vital, expressive of the direct action of light on the earth, giving lovely form and color at once, (compare the use of it by Dante, as the form of the sainted crowd in highest heaven); and remember that, therefore, the rose is, in the Greek mind, essentially a Doric flower, expressing the worship of Light, as the Iris or Ion is an Ionic one, expressing the worship ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... the 'valley of the shadow'? Was your ideal like this? I told you in Florence of the great poet Dante. You have here at a glance more beauty and dread conjoined than even his mad fancy could conjure up. That is the Tessino, braining itself in cataracts. Yonder, where the clouds make a golden lake, laving forests of firs, ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... passion and levity; and in the story which I have entitled Seeing and Believing, his exhibition of triumphant cunning. During the lives of Pulci and Boiardo, the fierce passions and severe ethics of Dante had been gradually giving way to a gentler and laxer state of opinion before the progress of luxury; and though Boiardo's enamoured Paladin retains a kind of virtue not common in any age to the heroes of warfare, the lord of Scandiano, who appears to have recited his poem, sometimes ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... has, I believe, much less 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 have the whole ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... to know well is to possess the foundations of true culture. It is a pretty scene and suggestive—the lad and his mother, reading together "till the wee small hours" Plutarch, Grote's History of Greece, Bullfinch's Mythology, Dante and the plays of William Shakespeare. Fortunately his mother was not his only helper. Near at hand was Theodore Parker who was said to possess the best private library in Boston, and whose passion for aiding young men was well known. ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... who died, Here martyred and hereafter glorified; And the great Rose upon its leaves displays Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays, With splendor upon splendor multiplied; And Beatrice, again at Dante's side, No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise. And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love And benedictions of the Holy Ghost; And the melodious bells among the spires ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... floor-slapping act of our Boma chimpanzee (1921). Boma offers this whenever he becomes especially desirous of entertaining a party of distinguished visitors. In stiff dancing posture, he leaps high in the air, precisely like a great black jumping-jack straight from Dante's Inferno. Orangs love to turn somersaults, and some individuals are so persistent about it as to wear the hair off their backs, disfigure their ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... I have reached the end of my idioms, though. I always said school was good for something, if one could only find it out," she archly cried, her little fingers running in arpeggios up the keys. "To think he understood them so! Then Dante's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and all became still as death, save the groaning of the wounded soldiers in the hospital, or the calls and cries of those left upon the battlefield. Oh, such a night, the night after the battle! The very remembrance of it is a vivid picture of Dante's "Inferno." To lie during the long and anxious watches of the night, surrounded by such scenes of suffering and woe, to continually hear the groans of the wounded, the whispered consultations of the surgeons over the ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... 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, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... that we ourselves are "such stuff as dreams are made on;" but this is not the mood in which he dwells. Again: while it is for the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it is the poet's task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the great creative poets, in Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe, how infinite the swarm of persons, the multitude of forms! But with Emerson the type is important, the common element. "In youth we are mad for persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all." "The same—the same!" ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... verse or a combination of prose and verse is very common, as one can see in the writings of Martianus Capella, Sidonius Apollinaris, Ennodius, and Boethius. It recurs again in modern times, for instance in Dante's La Vita Nuova, in Boccaccio, Aucassin et Nicolette, the Heptameron, the Celtic Ballads, the Arabian Nights, and in ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... of the spirit in three-fourths of his verse; Wordsworth is only not so bad as Byron, who thought him so much worse; Shakespeare himself, when he is reverently supposed not to be Shakespeare, is reading for martyrs; Dante's science and politics outweigh his poetry a thousandfold, and so on through the whole catalogue. Among ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the curtain went down upon the last scene of the Mediaeval world, a solitary figure crossed the stage, of whom you ought to know more than his mere name. This man was called Dante. He was the son of a Florentine lawyer who belonged to the Alighieri family and he saw the light of day in the year 1265. He grew up in the city of his ancestors while Giotto was painting his stories of the life of St. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... Richard Chenevix Trench, Henry Alford, Charles Mackay, Gerald Massey, Alfred Austin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Hugh Clough, Henry Burton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hartley Coleridge, Joseph Anstice, George Macdonald, Robert Leighton, John Henry Newman, John Sterling, Edward H. Bickersteth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and many others. Of German authors there are not a few, including Johann W. von Goethe, Johann C. F. Schiller, George A. Neumarck, Paul Gerhardt, Benjamin Schmolke, S. C. Schoener, Scheffler, Karl Rudolf Hagenbach, S. Rodigast, Novalis, Wolfgang C. Dessler, L. Gedicke, Martin ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... serpent Apapi, and at the twelfth 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
... hands, and rings flashed on white fingers under the wax-lights, and there was the pleasant fragrance of fresh white damask newly come from France. The tone of remark was a very common one in those times. Some one asked what Dante's pattern old Florentine would think if the life could come into him again under his leathern belt and bone clasp, and he could see silver forks on the table? And it was agreed on all hands that the habits of posterity would be very surprising to ancestors, if ancestors could only ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... its feudal sympathies it goes along with the religious art and vestment revival, the return to symbolic ceremonies, monastic vigils, and sisterhoods. Years ago, an acute writer in the Catholic World claimed Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a Catholic writer, from the internal evidence of his poems. The German Romanticism, which was fostered by the Romish priesthood, ended, or its disciples ended, in the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. It will be interesting to note ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... continued. "Ease? here it is; comfort? here it is; health? thank God, perfect; society? here are the kings of men on my shelves. I have only to summon them,—here Plato, Aristotle, AEschylus, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare! come here, and they come; speak, and they open their dead lips; be silent, and back they go to their shelves. I have not got your Greek Fathers yet; but they'll come. You notice that my theological library is rather scant. But I can borrow St. Thomas, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... smoking hot, the Bessemer converter "blowing off," the great cranes moving about like things of life, bearing giant kettles of molten steel; and amidst it all, human life held so cheaply. Nearer to mediaeval notions of hell comes this fiery scene than anything imagined by Dante. The working life of one of these men is not over ten years, B—— says. A decade of this intense heat, compared to which a breath of outdoor air in the close mill-yard, with the midsummer sun in the nineties, seems ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... rapture deferred that were not lavished upon me by my dear Princess, herself ever a luring delight of promise flitting just beyond my reach. Every sweet lover's inferno unguessed of by Dante she led me through. Ah! Those swooning tropic nights, under our palm trees, the distant surf a langourous murmur as from some vast sea shell of mystery, when she, my Princess, all but melted to my yearning, and with her laughter, ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... munificence, and for very valuable service conferred by it on Italian literature. "Another curious man is backwards and forwards here—a Lord Vernon,[126] who is well-informed, a great Italian scholar deep in Dante, and a very good-humoured gentleman, but who has fallen into the strange infatuation of attending every rifle-match that takes place in Switzerland, accompanied by two men who load rifles for him, one after another, which he has been frequently known to fire off, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... wealth. They have a taste for reading and prefer rather serious literature. With a perfect knowledge of Latin, English, German, and French, nearly all masters are open to them in the original. They miss only a few: Dante, Cervantes, and the ancient Greeks, although the more scholarly ones like Apponyi know Greek. Since they have much leisure, they often possess by the time they are thirty an extraordinarily interesting amount of ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... storm-cloud" (xii. 105 ff.). The shades of the departed, as seen by Heracles on the banks of the Cocytus, are compared to the countless leaves fluttering in the wind on "the gleaming headlands of Ida" (v. 65 ff.)—an image not unworthy of Dante or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... 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 ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... silver bell. There are few such voices out of England, but the combination of fair hair with dark eyes is the Venetian style of beauty. Rare in any land, yet there are occasional instances in each. For such, in Italy, was Dante's Beatrice; such, in Germany, was Louise of Stolberg, the wife of the last Stuart; and such, with ourselves, ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... finely made, and for the school tableaux in which she had frequently helped she had been generally cast for such parts as 'Nausicaa among her maidens,' 'Athene lighting the way for Odysseus and Telemachus,' 'Dante's Beatrice,' or any other personage requiring dignity, even a touch of majesty. Flowing skirts, indeed, at once made a queen of her. It was evident that she was not at her ease with her father; nor, as yet, with her father's ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... intolerable. Where the original poet put an effect of caesura, the translator puts an effect of rhyme; where the original poet puts an effect of rhyme, the translator puts an effect of caesura. Take Longfellow's "Dante." Does it give as good an idea of the original as our prose translation? Is it as interesting reading? Take Bayard Taylor's translation of "Goethe." Is it readable? Not to any one with an ear for verse. Will any one say that Taylor's would be read if the original ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... instincts and desires. Man will be farther removed from the divine and the 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 the other parts of the world. The Great Spirit ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... Dante, the celebrated Italian poet, has been described by Boccacio, as of a middle stature, of a pensive and melancholy expression in his countenance. He was courteous and civil, and his way of living extremely temperate. He is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... and the Odyssey do not become antiquated to us. The characters of Shakespeare are perpetually modern. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, stand alone in the closeness of their relation to nature. Each after his own manner gives us a view of life, as seen by the poetic imagination, such as no other poet has given to us. Homer, first of all poets, shows us individual personages sharply defined, but in the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... well aware of the ominous significance of these signs the storm was upon them, sweeping through the chute wherein they stood with rapidly increasing violence. The terrible, unseen hand of the Frozen North had unleashed its brood of furies, and the air rang with their hideous cries. It was Dante's third circle of hell let loose— Cerberus baying through his wide, threefold throat, and the voices of tormented souls shrilling through the infernal shades. It came from behind them, lifting the fur on the backs of the wolf-dogs and filling it with powder, pelting ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... philosophers have influence, for their ideas go coursing round the world until they have changed governments and institutions for better or for worse,—like those of Paul, of Socrates, of Augustine, of Dante, of Shakspeare, of Bacon, yea, of Rousseau. Some few favored rulers and leaders of men have had both power and influence, like Moses, Alfred, and Washington; and Elizabeth belongs to this class. Her influence was for good, and it permeated English life and society, like that of Victoria, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise, were not affected by the political struggles of England. The sole writing of Milton which was affected by English politics, his prose, belongs to literature only in so far as it throws light on the author of Paradise Lost. Dante's Divine Comedy, charged though it be with the political electricity of his times, was but little affected by the state of government. In other countries the government of the people was as much itself an effect ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... satire. It is sufficient to name, as examples of the extraordinary range of the mediaeval satiric genius, the farce of Pathelin, the beast-epic of Renart, the rhymes of Walter Map, and the Inferno of Dante. ...
— English Satires • Various
... shall it shine upon? Think of Plato, or Dante, or Tolstoy, or a Blue Book for such an occasion! I cannot. They will not do—they are no good to me. I am not writing about you. I know those men I have named are transcendent, the greater lights. But I am bound to confess at times they bore me. ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... are on a level with their own capacity; but you surely cannot regret that they should even manifestly (which however is not often ventured upon) shrink from your society. "Like to like" is a proverb older than the time of Dante, whose answer it was to Can della Scala, when reproached by him that the society of the most frivolous persons was more sought after at court than that of the poet and philosopher. "Given the amuser, the amusee must also be given."[71] You surely ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... When all men are Christians only a small element can be Christian in the average man. The thirteenth century, for instance, is supposed to be the golden age of Catholicism; but what seems to have filled it, if we may judge by the witness of Dante? Little but bitter conflicts, racial and religious; faithless rebellions, both in states and in individuals, against the Christian regimen; worldliness in the church, barbarism in the people, and a dawning of all sorts of scientific and aesthetic passions, in themselves quite pagan and contrary to ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... exclaimed, in a voice which grew steadier as she proceeded. "That was the only taste we did not share. Don Quixote in Spanish, Dante and Alfieri in Italian; and all the German brutes. Ah! Voltaire! Rousseau! What superb editions! No one can bind but the French. And the dear old Moniteur—all bound for posterity, which will never look ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton |
