a certain Beatrice Portinari, a beautiful girl of his own age and rank, and had grown up in partial sight of her, in some distant intercourse with her,” who became to him the ideal of all that was pure and noble and good; “made a great figure in his poem and a great figure in his life”; she died in 1290; he married another, “not happily, far from happily; in some civic Guelf-Ghibelline strife he was expelled the city, and his property confiscated; tried hard to recover it, even ‘with arms in his hand,’ but could not, and was doomed, ‘whenever caught, to be burned alive’; invited to confess his guilt and return, he sternly answered:  ’If I cannot return without calling myself guilty, I will never return.’” From this moment he was without home in this world; and “the great soul of Dante, homeless on earth, made its home more and more in that awful other world ... over which, this time-world, with its Florences and banishments, flutters as an unreal shadow.”  Dante’s heart, long filled with this, brooding over it in speechless thought and awe, bursts forth at length into “mystic unfathomable song,” and this, his “DIVINE COMEDY” (q. v.), the most remarkable of all modern Books, is the result.  He died after finishing it, not yet very old, at the age of 56.  He lies buried in his death-city Ravenna, “shutout from my native shores.”  The Florentines begged back his body in a century after; the Ravenna people would not give it (1265-1321).  See CARLYLE’S “HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP,” and Dean Plumptre’s “LIFE OF DANTE.”

DANTON, GEORGES JACQUES, “The Titan of the Forlorn Hope” of the French Revolution, born at Arcis-sur-Aube, “of good farmer people ... a huge, brawny, black-browed man, with a waste energy as of a Hercules”; an advocate by profession, “esurient, but with nothing to do; found Paris and his country in revolt, rose to the front of the strife; resolved to do or die”; the cause threatened, he threw himself again and again into the breach defiant, his motto “to dare, and to dare, and again to dare,” so as to put and keep the enemy in fear; “Let my name be blighted,” he said, “what am I?  The cause alone is great, and will live and not perish”; but the “SEA-GREEN” (q. v.) viewed him with jealousy, held him suspect, had him arrested, brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, the severity of whose proceedings under him he had condemned, and sentenced to the guillotine; a reflection of his in prison has been recorded:  “Oh, it were better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with governing of men.”  “No weakness, Danton,” he said to himself on the scaffold, as his heart began to sink within him as he thought of his wife.  His last words were to Samson the headsman:  “Thou wilt show my head to the people, it is worth showing”; words worthy of the brother of Mirabeau, who died saying, “I wish I could leave my head behind me, France needs it just now”; a man fiery-real, as has been said, genuine to the core, with many sins, yet lacking that greatest of sins, cant.  “He was,” says Mr. Belloc, “the most French, the most national, the nearest to the mother of all the Revolutionary group.  He summed up France ... when we study him, we see France” (1759-1794).  See CARLYLE’S “FRENCH REVOLUTION.”