DANTE.

POET! who in thy vision journeyedst through Hell's deep, and up the purifying hill,

Through fires both temporal and eternal, till The rose of God's elect entranced thy view,To thee had life revealed as to but few

Among the sons of men, what terrors fill The world's wild thicket, what the joyous

thrill

That knows alone the steadfast soul and true.

This great New World lay far beyond thy ken When thou didst conquer life, and win release From all its heavy load; yet now as then,

And here as there, thy words may never cease To breathe into the inmost souls of men Thy strength, thy tenderness, thy perfect peace.

DANTE IN AMERICA.

HERR SCARTAZZINI, the industrious GermanItalian commentator upon Dante, has spoken of America as the new Ravenna of the great poet.' The comparison is a little forced, for the spiritual abiding place of the deepest and tenderest of singers is now the whole civilized world, rather than any circumscribed area thereof; but our own country may at least claim a considerable share in his heritage, and no modern students have done him greater honor or paid him more true allegiance than our Longfellow, Lowell, and Parsons, among the dead, and our Charles Eliot Norton, among the living. These names occur to everyone who gives a moment's thought to the history of Dante studies in America, but there are few who realize how many other nineteenthcentury Americans have from time to time paid. the sincere tribute of their praise to the poet who, beyond any other that ever lived, binds with 'hoops of steel' the souls. of his followers to his

own.

We are more than ever before impressed with this fact after reading Mr. Theodore W. Koch's excellent study of Dante in America,' published as the chief feature of the Fifteenth Annual Report of the Dante Society, and also issued by the author as an independent volume. The work is the outcome of a suggestion made by Professor Norton, who, as early as 1865, when the sixth centenary of Dante's birth was celebrated, sent to the authorities at Florence a list of the more important American contributions that had then been made to the literature of the subject.

The first chapters of Mr. Koch's monograph are devoted to the work of the pioneers, among whom Lorenzo da Ponte, George Ticknor, and Richard Henry Wilde are the most noteworthy. The first of these three was a Venetian, who, after a picturesquely varied career in several lands, came to America at the age of fifty-six. It is interesting to note that he was the librettist of Mozart's Don Giovanni' and 'Le Nozze di Figaro,' and that when he began the book of the

former opera, he started by reading a few lines from Dante's "Inferno," in order, as he says, to

put himself into good tune.' He lived in America about thirty years, and died in New York in 1838. His occupation in New York was that of a bookseller. He also taught his native language, and was an unsalaried tutor at Columbia College for a term of years. There is evidence that he lectured and wrote a great deal upon the subject of Dante, and his contributions to the short-lived New York Review and Athenæum Magazine' constitute the first American textual criticism of 'The Divine Comedy.' Not very much is known of his life, and his closing years are wrapped in obscurity. In the pathetic preface of one of his later publications, he says: During twenty-eight years I have instructed in my language, which I, and no other, introduced into America, two thousand five hundred people, of whom two thousand four hundred and ninetyfour have forgotten me.'

At the time when Da Ponte was engaged in awakening our interest in Dante, a scholar of American birth was at work at the same task. What we may call the Harvard tradition concerning Dante began with George Ticknor, who had learned in Germany to know the poet, and