And that it is worth while to make the study there can be no doubt upon
the part of any seeker of truth and admirer of beauty.
Emerson said: "I think if I were a professor of rhetoric I should use
Dante for my text-book. Dante is the rhetorician. He is all wings, pure
imagination and he writes like Euclid." James Russell Lowell told his
students in answer to the question as to the best course of reading to
be followed: "If I may be allowed a personal illustration, it was my
own profound admiration for the Divina Commedia of Dante that lured me
into what little learning I possess." Gladstone declared: "In the school
of Dante I learned a great part of that mental provision ... which has
served me to make the journey of human life." It surely must be of
inestimable advantage to sit under the instruction of one of the race's
master teachers who stimulates one to lofty thinking and deep feeling,
leads one into realms of wider knowledge and helps one to know his own
age by revealing a mighty past.
To see that mighty past, to live again with Dante in the thirteenth
century is possible only after we have cleared the way with which
ignorance and misrepresentation have encumbered the approach. Here,
perhaps, more than in any other period of civilization is the dictum
true that history is often a conspiracy against the truth.
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