A Biography of Dante Alighieri; Set Forth as His Life Journey (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER FIRST. DANTE'S EARLIER SCHOOLING. Thus we approach the poet's youthful training for his sovereign deed when both he and the time become ripe. This first Epoch of his life, as he himself defines it, takes up a full quarter of a century and perhaps a little more, from his birth (1265) till he has passed his twenty-fifth year (1290-1). This stretch of time he has specially delimited and emphasized in some remarks of his (Convivio IV. 24), giving to it a distinctive name--Adolescence. Dante indeed loved to look out upon his and all human life and to measure it off into eras, or Ages as he called them. A well-known passage of his prose runs thus: "I say that human life divides itself into four Ages (etadi). The first is named Adolescence, that is the rising growth of life which lasts till the twenty-fifth year." Thus the poet, evidently looking backward through some intervening years, designates with precision one of his own life's boundaries, that of his first Epoch. But when he comes to mark out in the same passage and to name the other three Ages, he is less precise and less happy, the reason being probably that he has not yet experienced them in his own ease. For instance, he says the second Age to be that of Youth or Juvenescence, which lasts a score of years, from twenty-five to forty-five, and which is the "culmination of our life." We may here add that Dante in the later years of this second Age of his, wrote his Inferno, which certainly caps the topmost of his genius. The other two Ages are called by him Senescence and Old-Age (senio), one of which only he entered but did not complete. A full chapter Dante devotes to this subject in his Convivio (IV. 24), chiefly if not wholly written when he was fresh from the reading of Cicero's De Senectute...