Norton recalled having fallen ill for several weeks when he was ten years old and making his way to the study to announce to his mother, "I wish I could only live, so that I could edit Father's works." Those were the years before Andrews Norton had been betrayed by the very group of young Unitarian theologians (if they could be called that) whom Professor Norton had trained so vigorously at the Divinity School; those were the years before Reverend Norton grew weary of defending the Church against the relentless attacks of the Emersonian Transcendentalists and their quest to relocate the province of the divine in intuition and nature.

Charles Eliot Norton rested his gaze on the print of Giotto's portrait of Dante. This was one of the few items in the study furnished by Charles Eliot rather than one of his forefathers. The recently discovered Giotto portrait was one of the centerpieces of his essay "On the Portraits of Dante" which was to be included as an appendix in Longfellow's translation. The portrait showed Dante before the pains of exile had overtaken him, as the suitor of Beatrice, the gay companion of princes, the friend of poets, the celebrated young master of love verses in Florence. There was an almost feminine softness in the lines of the face, with a sweet and serious tenderness well-befitting one struck by love.

Norton imagined what it might have been like to converse with the poet on the streets of Tuscany. Boccaccio said Dante seldom spoke unless questioned. If any particularly pleasing contemplation came upon him when he was in company, it mattered not what it was that was asked of him, he would never answer the question until he had concluded or abandoned his train of thought. Dante had once found a book in a shop in Siena and spent the whole day reading it on a bench outside the shop, without once noticing the Sienese street festival, complete with musicians and dancing ladies, going on all around him.

The Giotto fresco had been discovered by the American historian Richard Henry Wilde, who led a restoration effort in Florence after coming across a mention of the fresco in an old manuscript. After scraping away several layers of whitewashing from the walls of the ancient Bargello, the team uncovered their prize. Seymour Kirkup, an Englishman assisting in the effort, traced the portrait onto paper. After a careless restoration attempt by government officials destroyed the painting, all that remained of the original fresco was Kirkup's sketch. An English printing company issued copies of Kirkup's version of the portrait, which the Cambridge circle anxiously procured through friends in England or shady second-hand foreign art dealers near the wharf. Kirkup later claimed sole credit for the discovery. Wilde, who spent years in Florence researching Dante's life, died before he could finish his work and before he could share with America his own version of the portrait's provenance.

As he sat, Charles Eliot Norton could not help but recite to himself the verses James Russell Lowell had written after first receiving his copy of the portrait of young Dante:

With half-drooped lids, and smooth, round brow,
And eye remote, that inly sees
Fair Beatrice's spirit wandering now
In some sea-lulled Hesperides,
Thou movest through the jarring street,
Secluded from the noise of feet
By her gift-blossom in thy hand,
Thy branch of palm from Holy Land;-
No trace is here of ruin's fiery sleet.

Yet there is something round thy lips
That prophesies the coming doom,
The soft, gray herald-shadow ere the eclipse
Notches the perfect disk with gloom;
A something that would banish thee,
And thine untamed pursuer be,
From men and their unworthy fates,
Though Florence had not shut her gates,
And Grief had loosed her clutch and let thee free.