"There is a Virgil by your hand, Messer," he said. "Open it. Look at the print and paper; it was printed at Venice. So I like to read that splendid verse. And yet Dante scarcely seems a poet to be read in print. I should like to possess his works written in a fine, neat, clerkly script, upon vellum, with little illuminations in the margin, angels in vermilion and ultramarine upon a golden ground; initial letters with quaint floral devices woven about them, heraldic monsters, the Gryphon with his car, Beatrice walking by the stream in the earthly Paradise. He chose Virgil as his master because, to him, Virgil was the sole Roman to whom the prophecy of Christ's coming had been revealed by the divine will; because Virgil himself had pictured the state of man after death; and, finally, because Virgil had been the singer of that Empire which Dante so greatly reverenced. The poetry of Dante has nothing of classical proportion; its unity is simply the unity of a philosophical system; its progress is like a pageant. But it is full of a sudden wilful beauty, a delight in natural things, moments of birdlike music when he speaks of birds, as in the lines: "'_Nell'ora che comincie i tristi lai La rondinella presso alla mattina, Forse a memoria de' suoi primi guai._' and when he describes the flight of cranes, or of the lark: "'_Quale allodetta, che in aere si spazia Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta Dell' ultima dolcezza, che la sazia._' It is like that delicate work of the illuminators, full of a kind of homeliness, a clear and luminous beauty; but it is not the same thing as Virgil's lines: "'_.... et bibit ingens Arcus: et e pastu decedens agmine magno Corvorum increpuit densis exercitus alis._' I do not think that Dante is a lesser poet; but he hath not, and never can have, the same universal appeal. He is terrible, full of swiftness, and energy, and hatred; devouring his subject like a flame. No poet hath lines so horrible, so inhuman as: "'_due dì li chiamai poi che fur morti: Poscia, più che il dolor, potè il digiuno. Quand' ebbe detto ciò, con gli occhi torti Riprese il teschio misero coi denti, Che furo all' osso, come d'un can, forti._' It is an exultation of hatred, a luxury in disgust, a joy in brutal vengeance which cannot be paralleled. Turn from it to these lines out of the _Paradiso_: "'_O dolce Amor, che di riso t' ammanti, Quanto parevi ardente in quei flailli, Ch' aveano spirto sol di pensier santi._' and you have some notion of his wide range from tumult into calm. Will you not drink a little wine?"