The one preceded and the
other followed the Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dante
was the first religious reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather
in the rudeness and acrimony, than in the boldness of his censures
of papal usurpation. Dante was the first awakener of entranced
Europe; he created a language, in itself music and persuasion, out
of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of
those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning;
the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth century
shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven, into the
darkness of the benighted world. His very words are instinct with
spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable
thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and
pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor. All
high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained
all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the
inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem
is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and
delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its
divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to
share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever
developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.
The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio, was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture,
and architecture.
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