Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/57

Rh ill-starred in time; too great to mingle with his age, or, by consequence, to be of much practical service to it; too embittered and austere to manifest in action the ineffable tenderness which may be clearly read in his writings; one whose friends and whose thoughts are in the other world, while he is yet more keenly alive than any other man to the realities of this; one whose greatness impressed the world from the first, and whom it does not yet fully know, after the study of six hundred years.