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... blind beggar wandering with his harp and dying without a home. After his death, seven cities disputed with one another to be considered his birthplace! Then there is Dante, exiled from his beloved Florence, homeless for nearly fifteen years, depending on the fickle favours of moody and even boorish patrons. Poignantly he has quintessenced the feeling of his humiliation in those lines: Tu proverai... the door, he saw a gaunt old man with weary eyes, who, on being asked what he wanted, said just one word: "Peace." This man was Dante, the greatest poet of Mediaeval Europe. Not until he died did Florence wake up to his worth. And when he was gone it urged its claim for his body upon the city of Ravenna where he had been buried. Byron has referred to the poet's resting-place at Ravenna: I pass... love or his genius, suffering not only from heartbreak but also from con-sumption, spitting out in blood-clots the lungs which had breathed forth the passionate enchanted music of the Ode to a Nightingale and the serene yet intense symphony of the Ode on a Grecian Urn — Keats who died at the age of twenty-four and voiced the depth of his disappointment by offering for his own epitaph the sentence: ...