I do not know what has become of him, but if he is like the rest of the strange group of my guides, philosophers, and friends in literature—­the printer, the organ-builder, the machinist, the drug-clerk, and the bookbinder—­I am afraid he is dead.  In fact, I who was then I, might be said to be dead too, so little is my past self like my present self in anything but the “increasing purpose” which has kept me one in my love of literature.  He was a gentle and kindly man, with a life and a longing, quite apart from his vocation, which were never lived or fulfilled.  I did not see him after he ceased to read Dante with me, and in fact I was instructed by the suspicions of my Italian friends to be careful how I consorted with a priest, who might very well be an Austrian spy.  I parted with him for no such picturesque reason, for I never believed him other than the truest and faithfulest of friends, but because I was then giving myself more entirely to work in which he could not help me.

Naturally enough this was a long poem in the terza rima of the “Divina Commedia,” and dealing with a story of our civil war in a fashion so remote that no editor would print it.  This was the first fruits and the last of my reading of Dante, in verse, and it was not so like Dante as I would have liked to make it; but Dante is not easy to imitate; he is too unconscious, and too single, too bent upon saying the thing that is in him, with whatever beauty inheres in it, to put on the graces that others may catch.

XXIX.  GOLDONI, MANZONI, D’AZEGLIO

However, this poem only shared the fate of nearly, all the others that I wrote at this time; they came back to me with unfailing regularity from all the magazine editors of the English-speaking world; I had no success with any of them till I sent Mr. Lowell a paper on recent Italian comedy for the North American Review, which he and Professor Norton had then begun to edit.  I was in the mean time printing the material of Venetian Life and the Italian Journeys in a Boston newspaper after its rejection by the magazines; and my literary life, almost without my willing it, had taken the course of critical observance of books and men in their actuality.

That is to say, I was studying manners, in the elder sense of the word, wherever I could get at them in the frank life of the people about me, and in such literature of Italy as was then modern.  In this pursuit I made a discovery that greatly interested me, and that specialized my inquiries.  I found that the Italians had no novels which treated of their contemporary life; that they had no modern fiction but the historical romance.  I found that if I wished to know their life from their literature I must go to their drama, which was even then endeavoring to give their, stage a faithful picture of their civilization.  There was even then in the new circumstance of a people just liberated from every variety of intellectual repression