As Florence was the central city of the age now under review, so Dantè Alighieri was its central literary light. He represented in perfect balance the moral and intellectual faculties then employed, and in him the romantic element reached at once the most distinct and noble development. Born at Florence, A.D. 1265, in harmony with the manifest rule of Providence he appeared at the time and place wherein he could best do his appointed work. The epoch in which he lived followed immediately upon that in which the Swabian minstrelsy began to echo on the northern side of the Alps; and it would seem that he emulated their picturesqueness as he described the moving breeze, the trembling light of the gently moving sea, the bursting of the clouds, the swelling of the rivers, and the entrance into the thick grove of the earthly paradise. Modern poetry began with Dantè, who, in a great measure, perfected the Italian tongue, which was before rude and inharmonious, but by him was fitted for the muses to adopt as their own. In 1302, the political party he had espoused was vanquished, and Dantè was forced into exile. But he continued to prosecute his glorious career until 1321, when he died at Ravenna. Hiding its infancy amid the darkness of ages, the Italian language became silently matured by the working of the secret people, until the moment arrived for a literature of life to spring full-grown and armed, like Minerva, from the head of its great father, Dantè. He was not, like Homer, the creator of poetry in the simplicity of childhood out of the arms of mother earth; rather, he was like Noah, the father of a second poetical world, fraught with all the treasures of antediluvian wealth, and yet glowing amidst superior charms of more recent growth. This fact he has himself strikingly portrayed, by representing his awful pilgrimage through other worlds as being made under the guidance of Virgil. The influence of the great epic by Dantè upon Italy has been compared to that which was exerted by the spark of the sun upon the personified clay of Prometheus. And yet his pen was a strong chisel rather than a delicate one; by a few bold strokes giving the outlines of life to the rough marble, but requiring the hand of a finer organization to elaborate the rude unfinished block.