The Roman character was imprinted everywhere, and the invasion of the Barbarians, in destroying Italy obscured the whole world.
"Italy appeared again with the divine treasures which the fugitive Greeks brought back to her bosom; heaven revealed its laws to her; the daring of her children discovered a new hemisphere; she again became sovereign by the sceptre of thought, but this laurelled sceptre only produced ingratitude.
"Imagination restored to her the universe which she had lost.

The painters and the poets created for her an earth, an Olympus, a hell, and a heaven; and her native fire, better guarded by her genius than by the Pagan deity, found not in Europe a Prometheus to ravish it from her.
"Why am I at the Capitol?
Why is my humble forehead about to receive the crown which Petrarch, has worn, and which remained suspended on the gloomy cypress that weeps over the tomb of Tasso ?--Why, if you were not so enamoured of glory, my fellow-countrymen, that you recompense its worship as much as its success?
"Well, if you so love this glory which too often chooses its victims among the conquerors which it has crowned, reflect with pride upon those ages which beheld the new birth of the arts.

Dante, the modern Homer, the hero of thought, the sacred poet of our religious mysteries, plunged his genius into the Styx to land in the infernal regions, and his mind was profound as the abyss which he has described.
"Italy in the days of her power was wholly revived in Dante.

Animated by a republican spirit, warrior as well as poet, he breathed the flame of action among the dead; and his shadows have a more vivid existence than the living here below.
"Terrestrial remembrances pursue them still; their aimless passions devour one another in the heart; they are moved at the past which seems to them less irrevocable than their eternal future.
"One would say that Dante, banished from his country, has transported into imaginary regions the pangs which devoured him.

His shades incessantly demand news from the scene of mortal existence, as the poet himself eagerly enquires after his native country; and hell presents itself to him in the form of exile.
"All, in his eyes, are clothed in the costume of Florence.