"It will appear presumptuous in the present writer to differ from so great a critic and such an enthusiastic student of Dante as Ruskin, but it seems to him that the author of Modern Painters has done scant justice to the intense insight of the poet into the beauties of the world we live in and his wonderful power of expressing what he saw. There are few even modern poets who have taken so wide a view of the field of nature, and even Shakespeare himself scarcely excells the great Florentine in felicity and concentration of expression. The Divina Commedia is full of vivid pictures covering the whole range of natural phenomena. As these pass before our eyes, we can scarcely realize that the painter of them is not of our own day, so thoroughly does he enter into the spirit of modern landscape art. {344} Sometimes his pictures are momentary impressions--studies of effects painted with a large brush; at others his touch is of a Preraphaelitic nicety, and now and then he gives us a studied composition full of doubtful detail like one of Turner's landscapes. He was one with Wordsworth in his sincere delight in every form of natural beauty. Like him, he lived beneath the habitual sway of fountains, meadows, hills and groves; with him he saw the 'splendor in the grass' and the 'glory in the flower.' He could 'feel the gladness of the May' and rejoiced in 'the innocent brightness of a new day.'" In the matter of science as distinct from poetic interest in nature, quite as much can be said for Dante. This greatest of Italian poets is a fair example to take of the university man of the thirteenth century in this respect. He was thirty-five before the first century of university existence properly so-called closed. He may be considered a typical product of university life. It is true he had had the almost inestimable advantage of the schooling and culture of his native Florence, where at the end of the thirteenth century there were more children, it is said, in attendance at the schools to the number of the population than there is at the present moment even in most of our American cities. Brother Azarias in his Essays Educational, [Footnote 43] said: [Footnote 43: Essays Educational, by Brother Azarias, with Preface by His Eminence Cardinal Gibbons. Chicago, D. H. McBride & Co., 1906.] "In the thirteenth century, out of a population of 90,000 in Florence, we find 12,000 children attending the schools, a ratio of school attendance as large as existed in New York City, in the year of Grace 1893." This ratio, it may be said, is as great as is ordinarily to be found anywhere, and this fact alone may serve to show {345} how earnest were these medieval burghers for the education of their children. Dante had the advantage of this, and in addition, of the training at two or three of the universities at least of Italy, besides spending some time at Paris, and probably a visit at least to Oxford.