A Study of Dante

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. 1886 edition. Excerpt: ...to its own consummation. Reaching down to give help, they have learned to reach upward to receive it. The true King is himself a type and prophecy of the King of Kings, and, by reflecting the divine ideal, he begins to aspire toward it. In the Valley of the Princes, Dante falls asleep and dreams that an eagle with feathers of gold swooping upon him snatches him upward to the fire. Out of this dream he wakes to find himself at the gate of Purgatory, and is told by Virgil that during his sleep he was borne thither by Lucia. That the dream is a "shadow of coming events," the poet himself tellsus, declaring that in sleep "the mind almost prophetic in its visions is "--as in a related passage he affirms that " oftentimes before a deed is done sleep has tidings of it." In a valuable appendix to his translation of the "Purgatory," Butler points out that " the eagle was from the earliest Christian times an emblem of the soul which most aspires to meditate on divine things, and as such was adopted for the special cognizance of St. John;" and he notices also that the fire up to which the poet is borne is the Empyrean Heaven or abode of that " Perfect Deity who alone perfectly sees and knows himself." In plain words, the dream anticipates a revelation of the Divine ideal, and implies that through contemplation of this ideal the soul shall be changed into its likeness. "Beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory." The vision discerned is matched with the momentum acquired, for the poet wakes to find himself beyond the negative region of Ante-Purgatory, and in view of the true entrance to the cleansing mount. Herein is mirrored a...