86 Dante Sexcentenary Lectures
and to end the days allotted to me), wandering as a stranger through
almost every region to which our language reaches, I have gone about
as a beggar, showing against my will the wound of fortune, which is
often wont to be imputed unjustly to the fault of him who is stricken.
Verily I have been as a ship without sails and without rudder, driven
to various harbors and shores by the parching wind which blows from
pinching poverty. And I have appeared vile in the eyes of many
who, perhaps from some report of me, had imagined me in a different
guise.
Through the first half of this period Dante’s dominant
hope and aim was to return to Florence. To this end he
at first associated himself with the others who had been
exiled with him and who now had thrown in their lot with
the members of the Ghibelline party. But the petty and
foolish conduct of the exiles disgusted him, and he soon drew
apart from them to pursue his own line of conduct. To this
episode in his career he refers in the “Paradiso” (xxvii,
61-69) :
But that shall gall thee most,
Will be the worthless and vile company,
With whom thou must be thrown into these straits.
For all ungrateful, impious all, and mad,
Shall turn ’gainst thee: but in a little while,
Theirs and not thine shall be the crimsoned brow.
Their course shall so evince their brutishness,
To have ta’en thy stand apart shall well become thee.
For a time Dante dissociated himself from efforts to
effect a return by violence and hoped for a spontaneous
recall by the government of the city. Meanwhile there
developed and grew strong within him a love for Italy
which his detached position enabled him to view as a whole.
He saw the country torn by internecine strife, and he longed
to see the warring parties united and at peace. The one
and only hope of accomplishing such unity lay, he decided,