II.
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t would be easy and profitless to printa mass of illustrative material.' The onething needful is to reach of a surety theyoung Dante as he was, "The way to readShakespeare is to read him": we all knowthat obiter dictum. After reading him, andnot before, turn to the commentators. In Rossetti we have a translator whoof all others is a poet. His noble andunstudied diction, his fine disregard of mereliterality, gave back to the world of lettersthe living humanities of their great original.Who will may best come to know Dantedirectly through this incomparable version.For " thus . . young Dante was^^ I For those who would follow the footsteps of 'thefather of Tuscan soi^' the late John AddinctonSvmonds' An tniroducHon to tht Study of *Dant* (thirdecBtion 1893) is a rvry suiEdent book. FORKWOU) We restore the divisions of La VitaNuova^ (indicated by Roman numerals,) asgiven in all Italian texts : their use is appar-ent. The foot-notes have been co l lected andplaced where they belong, at the end of the'the book. Our reproduction of DantisDream, — Rossetti's chef d^oeuvre, — confess-edly a suggestion only, is offered to theimaginative mind, and not to the eye alone.The painting itself is one of the acknowl-edged glories of English art; let the wordsof the Master, affixed to it at the AcademyexhlMtion in 1883, assist our deeper senseand inward vision : *<The scene is a chamber of dreams,strewn with poppies, where Beatrice is seenlying on a couch, as if just fallen back indeath; the winged figure of Love, in reddrapery (the pilgrim Love of the Vita Nuova,wearing the scallop shell on his shoulder)leads by the hand Dante, who walks con-scious but absorbed, as in sleep ; in his otherhand Love carries hb arrow pointed at thedreamer's heart, and with it a branch ofapple-blossom ; as he reaches the bier, Lovebends for a moment over Beatrice with thekiss which her lover has never given her;while the two green-dad dream-ladies hold.the pall full of May-blossom suspended foran instant before it covers her face for ever."
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