Read it through once

It is impossible to read for the first time, and with something of the eagerness of youth, Dante's three great poems, the "Convito", the "Commedia" and the "Convivio"; it is no less impossible to read them with the leisure of maturity and yet with the fresh mind. One always comes back to Dante as to a house whose rooms are many and have not yet been explored. But the house is not only large, it is also white; and the white walls are plainly visible even in the dusk. This particular fact about Dante has been overlooked by many who profess to study him. They see his ideas,—theological, political, poetical,—and they do not see the form in which they are expressed. They find him moral, he is also an artist; they read the contents of his mind, and they ignore the shape in which they are embodied.