"In the Romagna,çoisRené a country which I did not know, a multitude of towns, with their houses coated with marble lime, are perched on the tops of different little mountains, like coveys of white pigeons. Each of those towns possesses a few master-pieces of modern art or a few monuments of antiquity. This canton of Italy contains the whole of Roman history: the traveller should go through it with his Livy, Tacitus and Suetonius in his hand.
"I passed through Imola, the bishopric of Pius VII.[511], and Faenza. At Forli I went out of my road to visit Dante's tomb at Ravenna. As I approached the monument, I was seized with that thrill of admiration which a great renown gives, when the master of that renown has been unfortunate. Alfieri, who bore on his forehead _il pallor della morta e la speranza_, flung himself prone upon that marble and addressed to it his sonnet, _O gran Padre Alighier!_ Standing before the tomb, I applied to myself this verse from the _Purgatorio_:
Frate, Lo mondo è cieco, e tu vien ben da lui[512].
"Beatrice[513] appeared to me; I saw her as she was when she inspired her poet with the longing _di sospirare e di morir di pianto_[514]:
My plaintive song, take now thy mournful way, And find the dames and damosels, to whom Thy sisters, joyful-gay, Were wont to bear the light of sunny gladness, And thou, distressful daughter of my sadness, Go thou and dwell with them in cheerless gloom[515]!
"And yet the creator of a new world of poetry forgot Beatrice when she had left the earth! He only found her again, to adore her in his genius, when he was undeceived. Beatrice reproaches him with it, when she is preparing to show Paradise to her lover:
"'These looks,' she says to the powers of Paradise,
These looks sometimes upheld him; for I show'd My youthful eyes, and led him by their light In upright walking. Soon as I had reach'd The threshold of my second age, and changed My mortal for immortal; then he left me, And gave himself to others[516].
"Dante refused to return to his country at the price of a pardon. He replied to one of his kinsmen:
"'If there is no other way of returning to Florence than that which is opened to me, I shall not return there. I can everywhere contemplate the stars and sun.'"