The fame of the _Fiero Ghibellino_, as the Italians are wont to call Dante Alighieri, is great, not in extensiveness, but in weight. Wherever and to whomsoever he is known, his name and his works carry a charm and an authority vouchsafed to only a few in the department of authors. Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are _the_ poets, whose names are enshrined on an elevation above the rest; they breathe, so to speak, in an atmosphere of their own. They are, indeed, masters and guides, "Maestri di color che sanno." In truth, to understand their works, the study thereof must needs be made a specialty. Yet even those who have lisped their names in their mothers' tongue find that "_ars longa, vita brevis_." The student will drink at those pure fountains with ever-increasing pleasure. "How often have you been in St. Peter's?" asked of us a venerable monk, the first time we entered the Vatican. "Never before, sir." "Well," replied he, "I have been coming here almost every day for the last thirteen years, and every day I find some new thing to admire and study!" The same has been averred by those who have been familiar with Dante, Homer, and Shakespeare. {214} We well remember how, in our youth, and in our native schools, we were so trained in the study of Alighieri that it was an easy matter to discover whether an author, be he poet or prose-writer, had been formed on Dante, whether he had drunk at the head fountain or at side streams. Only few poets we remember whose verses we read with an enchanted devotion--Gasparo Leonarducci, of Venice; Vincenzo Monti, of Milan; and Alfonso Varano, of Ferrara. Of the prose-writers, Paolo Segneri, Sforza Pallavicino, of the seventeenth, and Pietro Giordani, of the nineteenth century, are the only _Danteschi_ in whom we delighted, as we were delighted in reading Homer transformed into the _succum et saporem_ of the _AEneid_. Those above mentioned were poets, historians, and orators, than whom more ardent and persevering students of Dante are not recorded in the annals of Italian literature. Theirs was not, however, a pedantic servility: Dante was the father that engendered their style, the eagle who provoked them to fly; and they did fly, and soared above the rest, and fixed their pupils on the brightness of the sun. Which remarks afford us also the measure by which to value the success of those who have attempted to translate Dante into foreign languages, an attempt which to the Italian scholar sounds almost presumptuous. For, if the style and the meaning of Dante have proven a matter of so much difficulty and labor to the countryman of Dante, how much more laborious and difficult must they prove to the foreign-born student?