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.