Dante (originally Durante) Alighieri was born at Florence in May, 1265, and died at Ravenna September 14, 1321. Both the _Divina Commedia_ and his other great work, the _Vita Nuova_ (the new life), narrate the love--either romantic or passionate--with which he was inspired by Beatrice Portinari, whom he first saw when he was nine years old and Beatrice eight. His whole future life and work are believed to have been determined by this ideal attachment. But an equally noteworthy fact of his literary career is that his works were produced in the midst of party strifes wherein the poet himself was a prominent actor. In the bitter feuds of the Guelfs and Ghibellines he bore the sufferings of failure, persecution, and exile. But above all these trials rose his heroic spirit and the sublime voice of his poems, which became a quickening prophecy, realized in the birth of Italian and of European literature, in the whole movement of the Renaissance, and in the ever-advancing development of the modern world. Church's clear-sighted interpretations of the mind and life of Dante, and of the history-making _Commedia_, attest the importance of including the poet and his work in this record of Great Events. The _Divina Commedia_ is one of the landmarks of history. More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art and the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the mind's power which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up ineffaceably and forever as time goes on marking out its advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the consent of all who come after. It stands with the _Iliad_ and Shakespeare's plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the _Novum Organon_ and the _Principia_, with Justinian's Code, with the Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens European literature, as the _Iliad_ did that of Greece and Rome. And, like the _Iliad_, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in undiminished freshness the literature which it began.