Dante was his spiritual consolation, his intellectual delight, and
indeed his daily bread; for out of that tremendous horn-book he taught
me to stammer the divine Italian language, and illustrated every lesson,
from the simplest rule of its syntax to its exceedingly complex and
artificially constructed prosody, out of the pages of that sublime,
grotesque, and altogether wonderful poem. My mother has told me that she
attributed her incapacity for relishing Milton to the fact of "Paradise
Lost" having been used as a lesson-book out of which she was made to
learn English--a circumstance which had made it for ever "Paradise
_Lost_" to her. I do not know why or how I escaped a similar misfortune
in my school-girl study of Dante, but luckily I did so, probably being
carried over the steep and stony way with comparative ease by the help
of my teacher's vivid enthusiasm. I have forgotten my Italian grammar,
rules of syntax and rules of prosody alike, but I read and re-read the
"Divina Commedia" with ever-increasing amazement and admiration. Setting
aside all its weightier claims to the high place it holds among the
finest achievements of human genius, I know of no poem in any language
in which so many single lines and detached passages can be found of
equally descriptive force, picturesque beauty, and delightful melody of
sound; the latter virtue may lie, perhaps, as much in the instrument
itself as in the master hand that touched it--the Italian tongue, the
resonance and vibrating power of which is quite as peculiar as its
liquid softness.
Pages:
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123