The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

I laugh and answer not,my soul is serene;

It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man.

The peach-trees are in flower, and the water flows on.

His last years were bitter, for he had never stopped to make money, and in the chaos of revolution and war he found no king to keep from that starvation which is the natural reward of poetry. In the end, after imprisonment, condemnation to death, pardon, and every experiment in suffering, he found his way to his childhood home, only to die three years afterward. Legend, unsatisfied with a common end for so extraordinary a soul, told how he was drowned in a river while attempting to embrace the water’s reflection of the moon.

Shall we have one more of his songs?

My ship is built of spice-wood and has a rudder of mulan;

Musicians sit at the two ends with jeweled bamboo flutes and pipes of gold.

What a pleasure it is, with a cask of sweet wine and singing girls beside me,

To drift on the water hither and thither with the waves!

I am happier than the fairy of the air,who rode on his yellow crane,

And free as the merman who followed the sea-gulls aimlessly.

Now with the strokes of my inspired pen I shake the Five Mountains.

My poem is done, I laugh, and my delight is vaster than the sea.

Oh, deathless poetry! The songs of Chu-ping are ever glorious as the sun and moon.

While the palaces and towers of the Chu kings have vanished from the hills.

6. DANTE Europe was passing through her Dark Ages when China, in the T’ang and Sung dynasties, “undoubtedly stood at the very forefront of civilization,” as “the most powerful, the most enlightened, the most progressive, and the best-governed empire on the face of the globe” (Murdoch). How slowly Europe recovered from her long nightmare of Roman degeneration and barbarian invasion!

But at last new cities grew, new wealth, and new poetry; from France to Persia, and from Nijni Novgorod to Lisbon, reawakened trade brought forth the flowers of literature and art. In Naishapur Omar the Tent-maker sang his Rubaiyat of disillusioned joy; in Paris Villon subtracted heads from bodies and added verse to verse; and in Florence, Dante met Beatrice, and was never the same again.

See him, aged nine, at a party, trying to hide in the midst of a multitude, conscious of every limb on his body and of every eye and mind in the room, wincing at the thought that such a man is stronger, and such a girl too beautiful to notice him. Suddenly Beatrice Portinari is before him-only a girl of eight, but at once he is in love with her, to the full depth of his adolescent soul, with a love too young to think of the flesh, and yet mature enough to be flooded with devotion. “At that instant I say truly that the spirit of life, which dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble with such violence that it appeared fearfully in the least pulses, and, trembling, said these words: ‘Behold a God stronger than I, who, coming, shall rule over me.’” So he writes years later, in an idealized account, for nothing in memory is ever so sweet as first love. And he goes on: