The eldest and greatest poet of modern Italy. He was of a noble Florentine family. He came into stormy times, and his life was tempestuous. His native city was then split between the fierce hostile factions of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the two great parties that distracted Germany and Italy in the middle ages. An _urban_ faction in Florence was that of the Blacks and Whites. Dante was a Ghibelline, and a White: a keen partisan, and a distinguished citizen, he shared the passions and the vicissitudes of his party. Two battles are mentioned in which he gained honour as a soldier. At thirty-five, he was in the supreme magistrature of the city. When Charles of Anjou, in passing through Florence, took the part of the Blacks, Dante was amongst the sufferers. He was condemned to exile, and confiscation of his property: but, on a revision of the sentence, to be burned alive. He wandered long, in France and in Italy, and rested at last, under the shelter of Guido Novelli, at Ravenna. He died there. He was once married, but not happily. A boyish love for Beatrice Portinari lives, as a sort of ethereal idea, throughout his poetry and life. He wandered and sang. His marvellous poem, “The Divine Comedy,” was composed during his long exile. It at once raised the modern Italian to the rank of a classical tongue, and the poetry of modern Italy to a height to which it has never again soared. The poet relates his journey, as a living man, through the three invisible worlds, which receive, as his church teaches, the souls of other men when released from the body: Hell, Purgatory, Heaven. Through Hell and Purgatory he is led by the shade of the poet Virgil--indeed his beloved leader in their common art. Through Paradise, his Beatrice herself, in whom he impersonates Theology, guides him. The ghosts he sees, those under punishment especially, are chiefly his deceased contemporaries, and Italians: so that the other shadowy world is with him almost a reflexion of his own world here. From the first step of his pilgrimage to the last, he sees sights of his own imagining, transcending all experience, almost all conception, yet delineated with such vivid precision, in language so simply real, that a feeling only short of belief accompanies the reader, and remains with him. Italian peasants meeting the poet, pointed out, as they looked with awe on “his pale and visionary brow,” the man who had been down to Hell. Prominent characteristics of his poetry are strength, daring, intensity, grace, absolute self-reliance, and boundless invention: above all, the continual self-presence of the poet as the centre to his own thoughts, and to the worlds which he traverses and describes. He began to write his poem in Latin verse; but Dante was too essentially a poet to write out of his mother-tongue;--a poet expresses _himself_ in his verse, and only the mother-tongue is near enough to him for that.