Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/60

42 seems a law that every great poem which thus resumes the thought of an age shall be a song, not of Carlyle's phœnix "soaring aloft, hovering with outstretched wings, filling earth with her music," but rather of the same phœnix "with spheral swan-song immolating herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and sing the clearer." Homer's theology, we may be sure, was already obsolete for the higher Greek mind when, or not long after,

Our own national epic, Shakespeare's series of historical plays, could not be written until the state of society it depicted was ceasing to exist.

Dante himself has told us the origin of his poem. In the last sonnet of his Vita Nuova he represents himself as having in thought followed Beatrice from earth to heaven:

Here is the germ of the Paradiso, at all events; but, to preclude all misapprehension, Dante adds: "After