Supper that night at 21 Charles Street was quieter than usual, though it was never quiet. Guests to the house always departed flabbergasted by the rate, not to mention the sheer volume, of the Holmeses’ talk, wondering whether any of these family members ever listened to one another at all. It was a tradition started by the doctor to award an extra serving of marmalade to the best conversationalist of the evening. Today, Dr. Holmes’s daughter, “little” Amelia, was chattering more than usual, telling of the latest engagement, of Miss B______to Colonel F______, and of what her sewing circle had been making for wedding gifts.

“Why, Father,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, hero, with a small grin. “I believe you’ll be deprived of the marmalade this evening.” Junior was out of place at the Holmes table: Not only was he six feet tall in a house-hold of quick, little persons, but he was stoically deliberate in speech and movement.

Holmes smiled thoughtfully over his roast. “But, Wendy, I haven’t heard much from you tonight.”

Junior hated when his father called him that. “Oh, I won’t win the helping. But neither will you, Father.” He turned to his younger brother, Edward, who was home only occasionally now that he boarded at the College. “They say they are raising a subscription to name a chair after poor Healey at the law school. Do you believe it, Neddie? After he ducked the Fugitive Slave Act, too, for all those years. Dying’s the only way Boston will pardon your past, for aught I know.”

On his after-supper walk, Dr. Holmes stopped to give some children playing marbles a handful of pennies with which to spell a word on the sidewalk. He chose knot (why not?), and when they formed the copper letters correctly, he let them keep the coins. He was glad the Boston summer was winding down, and with it the parching heat, which inflamed his asthma.

Holmes sat under the tall trees behind his house thinking of “the finest literary minds of New England” from Fields’s newspaper puff in the New York Tribune. Their Dante Club: It had importance for Lowell’s mission to introduce Dante’s poetry to America, for Fields’s publishing plans. Yes, there were the academic and the business stakes. But for Holmes the triumph of the club was its union of interests of that group of friends whom he felt most fortunate to have. He loved more than anything the free chatter and brilliant spark that were brought out when they were unlocking the poetry. The Dante Club was a healing association—for these last years that had suddenly aged them all—uniting Holmes and Lowell after their rifts over the war, uniting Fields with his best authors in his first year without his partner William Ticknor to provide security, uniting Longfellow with the outside world, or at least with some of its more literarily inclined ambassadors.

Holmes’s talent for translating was not extraordinary. He had the imagination needed but did not have that quality possessed by Longfellow, which allowed one poet to open fully to another poet’s voice. Still, in a nation with little free trade in thought with foreign countries, Oliver Wendell Holmes was happy to consider himself well versed in Dante: a Dantean more than Dante scholar. When Holmes was in college, Professor George Ticknor, the aristocratic litterateur, was nearing the end of his tolerance for the Harvard Corporation’s constant obstruction of his post as the first Smith Professor. Wendell Holmes, meanwhile, having mastered Greek and Latin at the age of twelve, was strangled by boredom in the required recitation hours of rote memorizing and repeating verses of Euripides’ Hecuba that had long ago been pummeled of meaning.

When they met in the Holmes family drawing room, Professor Ticknor’s steady black eyes took in the collegian, who was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Never still for a moment,” Oliver Wendell Holmes’s father, the Reverend Holmes, sighed. Ticknor suggested that Italian could discipline him. At the time, the department’s resources were too strained to formally offer the language. But Holmes soon received a loan of grammar and vocabulary instruction prepared by Ticknor, along with an edition of Dante’s Divina Commedia, a poem divided into “canticles” called Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Holmes feared now that the swells at Harvard had hit on something about Dante from the insightful position of ignorance. In medical school, the sciences had allowed Oliver Wendell Holmes to discover how nature operated when freed from superstition and fear. He believed that just as astronomy had replaced astrology, so would “theonomy” rise up one day over its slow-witted twin. With this faith, Holmes prospered as a poet and a professor.

Then the war ambushed Dr. Holmes, and so did Dante Alighieri.

It began one evening in the winter of 1861. Holmes was sitting in Elmwood, Lowell’s mansion, fidgeting at the news of Wendell Junior’s departure with the 25th Massachusetts Regiment. Lowell was the right antidote for his nerves: brash and loudly confident that the world was at all times exactly as he said it was; derisive, if necessary, if one’s concerns were too dominant.

Since that summer, society had sorely missed the soothing presence of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow wrote his friends notes declining all invitations that would have compelled him to leave Craigie House, explaining that he was occupied. He had begun translating Dante, he said, and did not plan to stop: I have done this work when I can do nothing else.

Coming from the reticent Longfellow, these notes were screaming laments. He was outwardly calm but inwardly bleeding to death.

So Lowell, planted on Longfellow’s doorstep, insisted on helping. Lowell had long bemoaned the fact that Americans, ill-trained in modern languages, hadn’t access even to the few regrettable British translations that existed.

“I need a poet’s name to sell such a book to the donkey public!” Fields would say to Lowell’s apocalyptic warnings about America’s blindness to Dante. Whenever Fields wished to discourage his authors from a risky project, he pointed out the stupidity of the reading public.

Lowell had bothered Longfellow to translate the tripartite poem many times over the years, even once threatening to do it himself—something for which he did not have the inner strength. Now he couldn’t not help. After all, Lowell was one of the few American scholars to know anything of Dante; indeed, he seemed to know everything.

Lowell detailed for Holmes how remarkably Longfellow was capturing Dante, from the cantos Longfellow had shown him. “He was born for the task, I rather think, Wendell.” Longfellow was starting with Paradiso and then would turn to Purgatorio and finally Inferno.

“Moving backwards?” Holmes asked, intrigued.

Lowell nodded and grinned. “I daresay dear Longfellow wants to make sure of Heaven before committing himself to Hell.”

“I never can go all the way through to Lucifer,” Holmes said, commenting on Inferno. “Purgatory and Paradise are all music and hope, and you feel you are floating toward God. But the hideousness, the savagery, of that medieval nightmare! Alexander the Great ought to have slept with it under the pillow.”

“Dante’s Hell is part of our world as much as part of the underworld, and shouldn’t be avoided,” Lowell said, “but rather confronted. We sound the depths of Hell very often in this life.”

The force of Dante’s poetry resonated most in those who did not confess the Catholic faith, for believers inevitably would have quibbles with Dante’s theology. But for those most distant theologically, Dante’s faith was so perfect, so unyielding, that a reader found himself compelled by the poetry to take it all to heart. This is why Holmes feared the Dante Club: He feared that it would usher in a new Hell, one empowered by the poets’ sheer literary genius. And, worse yet, he feared that he himself, after a life spent running away from the devil preached by his father, would be partially to blame.