With these feelings in his heart, no money in his purse, and no place in which to lay his head, except such as chance-patrons afforded him, he now began to wander over Italy, like some lonely lion of a man, “grudging in his great disdain.”  At one moment he was conspiring and hoping; at another, despairing and endeavouring to conciliate his beautiful Florence:  now again catching hope from some new movement of the Emperor’s; and then, not very handsomely threatening and re-abusing her; but always pondering and grieving, or trying to appease his thoughts with some composition, chiefly of his great work.  It is conjectured, that whenever anything particularly affected him, whether with joy or sorrow, he put it, hot with the impression, into his “sacred poem.”  Every body who jarred against his sense of right or his prejudices he sent to the infernal regions, friend or foe:  the strangest people who sided with them (but certainly no personal foe) he exalted to heaven.  He encouraged, if not personally assisted, two ineffectual attempts of the Ghibellines against Florence; wrote, besides his great work, a book of mixed prose and poetry on “Love and Virtue” (the Convito, or Banquet); a Latin treatise on Monarchy (de Monarchia), recommending the “divine right” of the Emperor; another in two parts, and in the same language, on the Vernacular Tongue (de Vulgari Eloquio); and learnt to know meanwhile, as he affectingly tells us, “how hard it was to climb other people’s stairs, and how salt the taste of bread is that is not our own.”  It is even thought not improbable, from one awful passage of his poem, that he may have “placed himself in some public way,” and, “stripping his visage of all shame, and trembling in his very vitals,” have stretched out his hand “for charity” [13]—­an image of suffering, which, proud as he was, yet considering how great a man, is almost enough to make one’s common nature stoop down for pardon at his feet; and yet he should first prostrate himself at the feet of that nature for his outrages on God and man.  Several of the princes and feudal chieftains of Italy entertained the poet for a while in their houses; but genius and worldly power, unless for worldly purposes, find it difficult to accord, especially in tempers like his.  There must be great wisdom and amiableness on both sides to save them from jealousy of one another’s pretensions.  Dante was not the man to give and take in such matters on equal terms; and hence he is at one time in a palace, and at another in a solitude.  Now he is in Sienna, now in Arezzo, now in Bologna; then probably in Verona with Can Grande’s elder brother; then (if we are to believe those who have tracked his steps) in Casentino; then with the Marchese Moroello Malaspina in Lunigiana; then with the great Ghibelline chieftain Faggiuola in the mountains near Urbino; then in Romagna, in Padua, in Paris (arguing with the churchmen), some say in Germany, and at Oxford; then again in Italy; in Lucca