The Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

A staunch loyalist to classical studies and languages, Manning, it was said, had once spent an entire year conducting all his personal and business affairs in Latin; some doubted this, noting that his wife did not know the language, while other acquaintances remarked that this fact confirmed the story’s veracity.

Pity without rigor would be cowardly egotism, mere sentimentality.”

‘And what they dare to dream of, dare to do.’

The proof of poetry was, in Lowell’s mind, that it reduced to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy that floated in all men’s minds, so as to render it portable and useful, ready to the hand.

Fame did not mean much to Lowell, who liked only to think that his friends found some good in what he wrote and that Mabel Lowell would be proud of being his daughter after he was gone.

teres atque rotundus:

In himself entirely smooth and round. (Self-confident, self-sufficient, well-rounded)

“‘Midway through the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark wood, for the right way had been lost.’”

“Though a woman tempted man to eat, my dear Longfellow,” said Holmes, “you never hear of Eve having to do with his drinking, for he took to that of his own notion.”

Ideas must work through the bones and arms of good men or they are no better than dreams.

“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”

‘Though an angel shall write, still ’tis the devils must print?’ I mean to have that engraved on a seal one day.” Houghton covered his dignified chuckle under his hand. “Thomas Moore,” Lowell could not help answering, all-knowingly.

“One might think this was the back room of a tavern rather than the State House!” Lowell complained as he waved away some fugitive smoke. “Why, Mr. Lowell, have you not bragged of smoking ten cigars in one day, and called the sensation a Muse?” Holmes chided. “We never like the smell of our own vices in other people, Holmes. Ah, let’s steer here for a drink or two,” Lowell suggested.

“Oh, Holmes! Did you never sow your tame oats? A wife cannot be your Beatrice. You may trust my advice, for in common with Petrarch, Dante, and Byron, I was desperately in love before I was ten years old.

There was the most beautiful creature I had ever set eyes upon, not unlike that fair beauty enchanting her husband’s friends over there in the corner. Her features were perfectly Jewish. She had a dark complexion, but one of those clear faces where every shade of feeling floats across like the shadow of a cloud across the grass.

There is only one way to go with flirtatious women, Wendell, and that is to run.