Frate, Lo mondo è cieco, e tu vien ben da lui[512]. "Beatrice[513] appeared to me; I saw her as she was when she inspired her poet with the longing _di sospirare e di morir di pianto_[514]: My plaintive song, take now thy mournful way, And find the dames and damosels, to whom Thy sisters, joyful-gay, Were wont to bear the light of sunny gladness, And thou, distressful daughter of my sadness, Go thou and dwell with them in cheerless gloom[515]! "And yet the creator of a new world of poetry forgot Beatrice when she had left the earth! He only found her again, to adore her in his genius, when he was undeceived. Beatrice reproaches him with it, when she is preparing to show Paradise to her lover: "'These looks,' she says to the powers of Paradise, These looks sometimes upheld him; for I show'd My youthful eyes, and led him by their light In upright walking. Soon as I had reach'd The threshold of my second age, and changed My mortal for immortal; then he left me, And gave himself to others[516]. "Dante refused to return to his country at the price of a pardon. He replied to one of his kinsmen: "'If there is no other way of returning to Florence than that which is opened to me, I shall not return there. I can everywhere contemplate the stars and sun.'" Dante refused the Florentines his days and Ravenna refused them his ashes, even though Michael Angelo, the resuscitated genius of the poet, was resolving to decorate the funeral monument of him who had learnt _come l'uom s'eterna._[517] "The painter of the Last Judgment, the sculptor of the Moses, the architect of the dome of St. Peter's, the engineer of the Old Bastion at Florence, the poet of the sonnets addressed to Dante joined his fellow-townsmen and supported the petition which they presented to Leo X. with these words: "'_Io Michel Agnolo, scultore, il medesimo a Vostra Santità supplico, offerendomi al divin poeta fare la sepoltura sua condecente e in loco onorevole in quest a città._' "Michael Angelo, whose chisel was disappointed in its hope, had recourse to his pencil to raise another mausoleum to that other himself. He drew the principal subjects of the _Divina Commedia_ on the margins of a folio copy of the works of the great poet; a vessel which bore this two-fold monument from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia suffered shipwreck. "I returned much moved and feeling something of that commotion, mingled with a divine terror, which I experienced at Jerusalem when my _cicerone_ proposed to take me to Lord Byron's house. Ah, what were Childe Harold and the Signora Guiccioli[518] to me in presence of Dante and Beatrice! Misfortune and the centuries are still lacking to Childe Harold; let him await the future. Byron was badly inspired in his _Prophecy of Dante._