ITALY: Grave Alice

Benito Mussolini, Prime Minister of Italy, proud, erect and honored, bent low his manly form to kiss the hand of Miss Alice Longfellow, one of the three daughters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet, of whom their father wrote:

Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,

And Edith with golden hair.*

Grave Alice smiled with pleasure. She presented Il Duce with a copy of her father’s translation of Dante’s Divinia Commedia—a work that had aroused enthusiasm at Harvard in the 80’s and had given a great impulse to the study of Dante in the U. S. Signor Mussolini gravely thanked her for thus honoring him and, in a cordial conversation, expressed his great admiration for her poet-father.

*”The Children’s Hour.”