" It was during his exile
that Dante completed his immortal Divina Commedia, the child of his
thought "cradled into poetry by wrong." Dante never again saw Florence
for which he yearned with all the intensity of the Hebrew captives weeping
on the rivers of Babylon for a sight of Jerusalem. Death came to free his
undaunted soul in the year 1321 while he was a guest at Ravenna of Guido
Novello da Polenta, a nephew of Francesca da Rimini. At Ravenna the last
seat of Roman arts and letters, in a sepulchre attached to the convent
of the Franciscan monks, he was buried with the honors due to a saint
and a sage. The inscription on his epitaph said to have been composed by
him on his deathbed, is paraphrased by Lowell in the following words:
"The rights of Monarchy, the Heavens, the stream of Fire, the Pit
In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed fit.
But since my soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars,
And happier now, hath gone to seek its Maker with the stars,
Here am I, Dante, shut, exiled from the ancestral shore
Whom Florence, the fairest of all-least-loving mothers, bore."
Such is the brief outline of the outward life of him of whom
Michelangelo declared:
"Ne'er walked the earth a greater man than he.
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