Page:A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields.djvu/199

He beheld on the scaffold the torch applied to the victims;
He saw during thirty years pass of crime the wild surges;
And the word 'Fatherland' flung to the winds of all quarters
Without profit for the people or the cause of fair freedom.
O Dante Alighieri of Florence! Poet immortal!
I understand to-day thy sufferings poignant and deathful!
O lover of Beatrice,—to exile condemned from thy country,
I understand that eye hollow, and that gaunt forehead wrinkled,
The disgust of the things of this world, the terrible heartache
Endless—the hatred profound and all but eternal,
That in whipping up thy humours made thee atrocious,
And flooded thy pen and thy heart with bitterness savage.
Thus, after the manners of thy town, manners long vanished,
Artist, thou paintedst a canvas that holds us still spellbound,
A picture of perversity—of the loosed human passions,
With such energy, such grandeur, such truth, and such courage,
That little children who saw thee by day in Ravenna,
Traversing some plain lonely, or some street in the distance,
Cried out in contemplating thy brow livid and clouded,
'Lo! lo! The man that comes back from the regions infernal!'