Often, the
nights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie House to the
carpenter's box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away, I was as if
soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen blocks
of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along the middle of
the road. I still think that was the richest moment of my life, and I
look back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, which I
would most like to live over again--if I must live any. The next winter
the sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the house of Mr.
Norton, who was then completing his version of the 'Vita Nuova'. This
has always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow's
translation of the 'Commedia'. In fact, it joins the effect of a
sympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and a
delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not know
whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version of
the 'Commedia' than in this of the 'Vita Nuova', but I do not believe he
could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and
canzonets. I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen. He has
always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are never
impossible in the right hands.
V.
After three or four years we sold the carpenter's box on Sacramento
Street, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in the
immediate neighborhood of Longfellow.
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