Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers, Volume 1

by Leigh Hunt

II.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY.

Argument.

Purgatory, in the system of Dante, is a mountain at the Antipodes, on the top of which is the Terrestrial Paradise, once the seat of Adam and Eve. It forms the principal part of an island in a sea, and possesses a pure air. Its lowest region, with one or two exceptions of redeemed Pagans, is occupied by Excommunicated Penitents and by Delayers of Penitence, all of whom are compelled to lose time before their atonement commences. The other and greater portion of the ascent is divided into circles or plains, in which are expiated the Seven Deadly Sins. The Poet ascends from circle to circle with Virgil and Statius, and is met in a forest on the top by the spirit of Beatrice, who transports him to Heaven.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY.

When the pilgrims emerged from the opening through which they beheld the stars, they found themselves in a scene which enchanted them with hope and joy. It was dawn: a sweet pure air came on their faces; and they beheld a sky of the loveliest oriental sapphire, whose colour seemed to pervade the whole serene hollow from earth to heaven. The beautiful planet which encourages loving thoughts made all the orient laugh, obscuring by its very radiance the stars in its train; and among those which were still lingering and sparkling in the southern horizon, Dante saw four in the shape of a cross, never beheld by man since they gladdened the eyes of our first parents. Heaven seemed to rejoice in their possession. O widowed northern pole! bereaved art thou, indeed, since thou canst not gaze upon them![1]

The poet turned to look at the north where he had been accustomed to see stars that no longer appeared, and beheld, at his side, an old man, who struck his beholder with a veneration like that of a son for his father. He had grey hairs, and a long beard which parted in two down his bosom; and the four southern stars beamed on his face with such lustre, that his aspect was as radiant as if he had stood in the sun.

"Who are ye?" said the old man, "that have escaped from the dreadful prison-house? Can the laws of the abyss be violated? Or has Heaven changed its mind, that thus ye are allowed to come from the regions of condemnation into mine?"

It was the spirit of Cato of Utica, the warder of the ascent of purgatory.

The Roman poet explained to his countryman who they were, and how Dante was under heavenly protection; and then he prayed leave of passage of him by the love he bore to the chaste eyes of his Marcia, who sent him a message from the Pagan circle, hoping that he would still own her.

Cato replied, that although he was so fond of Marcia while on earth that he could deny her nothing, he had ceased, in obedience to new laws, to have any affection for her, now that she dwelt beyond the evil river; but as the pilgrim, his companion, was under heavenly protection, he would of course do what he desired.[2] He then desired him to gird his companion with one of the simplest and completest rushes he would see by the water's side, and to wash the stain of the lower world out of his face, and so take their journey up the mountain before them, by a path which the rising sun would disclose. And with these words he disappeared.[3]

The pilgrims passed on, with the eagerness of one who thinks every step in vain till he finds the path he has lost. The full dawn by this time had arisen, and they saw the trembling of the sea in the distance.[4] Virgil then dipped his hands into a spot of dewy grass, where the sun had least affected it, and with the moisture bathed the face of Dante, who held it out to him, suffused with tears;[5] and then they went on till they came to a solitary shore, whence no voyager had ever returned, and there the loins of the Florentine were girt with the rush.

On this shore they were standing in doubt how to proceed,—moving onward, as it were, in mind, while yet their feet were staying,—when they be held a light over the water at a distance, rayless at first as the planet Mars when he looks redly out of the horizon through a fog, but speedily growing brighter and brighter with amazing swiftness. Dante had but turned for an instant to ask his guide what it was, when, on looking again, it had grown far brighter. Two splendid phenomena, he knew not what, then developed themselves from it on either side; and, by degrees, another below it. The two splendours quickly turned out to be wings; and Virgil, who had hitherto watched its coming in silence, cried out, "Down, down,—on thy knees! It is God's angel. Clasp thine hands. Now thou shalt behold operancy indeed. Lo, how he needs neither sail nor oar, coming all this way with nothing but his wings! Lo, how he holds them aloft, using the air with them at his will, and knowing they can never be weary."

The "divine bird" grew brighter and brighter as he came, so that the eye at last could not sustain the lustre; and Dante turned his to the ground. A boat then rushed to shore which the angel had brought with him, so light that it drew not a drop of water. The celestial pilot stood at the helm, with bliss written in his face; and a hundred spirits were seen within the boat, who, lifting up their voices, sang the psalm beginning "When Israel came out of Egypt." At the close of the psalm, the angel blessed them with the sign of the cross, and they all leaped to shore; upon which he turned round, and departed as swiftly as he came.

The new-comers, after gazing about them for a while, in the manner of those who are astonished to see new sights, inquired of Virgil and his companion the best way to the mountain. Virgil explained who they were; and the spirits, pale with astonishment at beholding in Dante a living and breathing man, crowded about him, in spite of their anxiety to shorten the period of their trials. One of them came darting out of the press to embrace him, in a manner so affectionate as to move the poet to return his warmth; but his arms again and again found themselves crossed on his own bosom, having encircled nothing. The shadow, smiling at the astonishment in the other's face, drew back; and Dante hastened as much forward to shew his zeal in the greeting, when the spirit in a sweet voice recommended him to desist. The Florentine then knew who it was,—Casella, a musician, to whom he had been much attached. After mutual explanations as to their meeting, Dante requested his friend, if no ordinance opposed it, to refresh his spirit awhile with one of the tender airs that used to charm away all his troubles on earth. Casella immediately began one of his friend's own productions, commencing with the words,

"Love, that delights to talk unto my soul Of all the wonders of my lady's nature."

And he sang it so beautifully, that the sweetness rang within the poet's heart while recording the circumstance. The other spirits listened with such attention, that they seemed to have forgotten the very purpose of their coming; when suddenly the voice of Cato was heard, sternly rebuking their delay; and the whole party speeded in trepidation towards the mountain.[6]

The two pilgrims, who had at first hastened with the others, in a little while slackened their steps; and Dante found that his body projected a shadow, while the form of Virgil had none. When arrived at the foot of the mountain, they were joined by a second party of spirits, of whom Virgil inquired the way up it. One of the spirits, of a noble aspect, but with a gaping wound in his forehead, stepped forth, and asked Dante if he remembered him. The poet humbly answering in the negative, the stranger disclosed a second wound, that was in his bosom; and then, with a smile, announced himself as Manfredi, king of Naples, who was slain in battle against Charles of Anjou, and died excommunicated. Manfredi gave Dante a message to his daughter Costanza, queen of Arragon, begging her to shorten the consequences of the excommunication by her prayers; since he, like the rest of the party with him, though repenting of his contumacy against the church, would have to wander on the outskirts of Purgatory three times as long as the presumption had lasted, unless relieved by such petitions from the living.[7]

Dante went on, with his thoughts so full of this request, that he did not perceive he had arrived at the path which Virgil asked for, till the wandering spirits called out to them to say so. The pilgrims then, with great difficulty, began to ascend through an extremely narrow passage; and Virgil, after explaining to Dante how it was that in this antipodal region his eastward face beheld the sun in the north instead of the south, was encouraging him to proceed manfully in the hope of finding the path easier by degrees, and of reposing at the end of it, when they heard a voice observing, that they would most likely find it expedient to repose a little sooner. The pilgrims looked about them, and observed close at hand a crag of a rock, in the shade of which some spirits were standing, as men stand idly at noon. Another was sitting down, as if tired out, with his arms about his knees, and his face bent down between them.[8]

"Dearest master!" exclaimed Dante to his guide, "what thinkest thou of a croucher like this, for manful journeying? Verily he seems to have been twin-born with Idleness herself."

The croucher, lifting up his eyes at these words, looked hard at Dante, and said, "Since thou art so stout, push on."

Dante then saw it was Belacqua, a pleasant acquaintance of his, famous for his indolence.

"That was a good lesson," said Belacqua, "that was given thee just now in astronomy."

The poet could not help smiling at the manner in which his acquaintance uttered these words, it was so like his ways of old. Belacqua pretended, even in another world, that it was of no use to make haste, since the angel had prohibited his going higher up the mountain. He and his companions had to walk round the foot of it as many years as they had delayed repenting; unless, as in the case of Manfredi, their time was shortened by the prayers of good people.

A little further on, the pilgrims encountered the spirits of such Delayers of Penitence as, having died violent deaths, repented at the last moment. One of them, Buonconte da Montefeltro, who died in battle, and whose body could not be found, described how the devil, having been hindered from seizing him by the shedding of a single tear, had raised in his fury a tremendous tempest, which sent the body down the river Arno, and buried it in the mud.[9]

Another spirit, a female, said to Dante, "Ah! when thou returnest to earth, and shalt have rested from thy long journey, remember me,—Pia. Sienna gave me life; the Marshes took it from me. This he knows, who put on my finger the wedding-ring."[10]

The majority of this party were so importunate with the Florentine to procure them the prayers of their friends, that he had as much difficulty to get away, as a winner at dice has to free himself from the mercenary congratulations of the by-standers. On resuming their way, Dante quoted to Virgil a passage in the Æneid, decrying the utility of prayer, and begged him to explain how it was to be reconciled with what they had just heard. Virgil advised him to wait for the explanation till he saw Beatrice, whom, he now said, he should meet at the top of the mountain. Dante, at this information, expressed a desire to hasten their progress; and Virgil, seeing a spirit looking towards them as they advanced, requested him to acquaint them with the shortest road.

The spirit, maintaining a lofty and reserved aspect, was as silent as if he had not heard the request; intimating by his manner that they might as well proceed without repeating it, and eyeing them like a lion on the watch. Virgil, however, went up to him, and gently urged it; but the only reply was a question as to who they were and of what country. The Latin poet beginning to answer him, had scarcely mentioned the word "Mantua," when the stranger went as eagerly up to his interrogator as the latter had done to him, and said, "Mantua! My own country! My name is Sordello." And the compatriots embraced.

O degenerate Italy! exclaims Dante; land without affections, without principle, without faith in any one good thing! here was a man who could not hear the sweet sound of a fellow-citizen's voice without feeling his heart gush towards him, and there are no people now in any one of thy towns that do not hate and torment one another.

Sordello, in another tone, now exclaimed, "But who are ye?"

Virgil disclosed himself, and Sordello fell at his feet.[11]

Sordello now undertook to accompany the great Roman poet and his friend to a certain distance on their ascent towards the penal quarters of the mountain; but as evening was drawing nigh, and the ascent could not be made properly in the dark, he proposed that they should await the dawning of the next day in a recess that overlooked a flowery hollow. The hollow was a lovely spot of ground, enamelled with flowers that surpassed the exquisitest dyes, and green with a grass brighter than emeralds newly broken.[12] There rose from it also a fragrance of a thousand different kinds of sweetness, all mingled into one that was new and indescribable; and with the fragrance there ascended the chant of the prayer beginning "Hail, Queen of Heaven,"[13] which was sung by a multitude of souls that appeared sitting on the flowery sward.

Virgil pointed them out. They were penitent delayers of penitence, of sovereign rank. Among them, however, were spirits who sat mute; one of whom was the Emperor Rodolph, who ought to have attended better to Italy, the garden of the empire; and another, Ottocar, king of Bohemia, his enemy, who now comforted him; and another, with a small nose,[14] Philip the Third of France, who died a fugitive, shedding the leaves of the lily; he sat beating his breast; and with him was Henry the Third of Navarre, sighing with his cheek on his hand. One was the father, and one the father-in-law of Philip the Handsome, the bane of France; and it was on account of his unworthiness they grieved.

But among the singers Virgil pointed out the strong-limbed King of Arragon, Pedro; and Charles, king of Naples, with his masculine nose (these two were singing together); and Henry the Third of England, the king of the simple life, sitting by himself;[15] and below these, but with his eyes in heaven, Guglielmo marquis of Montferrat.

It was now the hour when men at sea think longingly of home, and feel their hearts melt within them to remember the day on which they bade adieu to beloved friends; and now, too, was the hour when the pilgrim, new to his journey, is thrilled with the like tenderness, when he hears the vesper-bell in the distance, which seems to mourn for the expiring day.[16] At this hour of the coming darkness, Dante beheld one of the spirits in the flowery hollow arise, and after giving a signal to the others to do as he did, stretch forth both hands, palm to palm, towards the East, and with softest emotion commence the hymn beginning,

"Thee before the closing light."[17]

Upon which all the rest devoutly and softly followed him, keeping their eyes fixed on the heavens. At the end of it they remained, with pale countenances, in an attitude of humble expectation; and Dante saw the angels issue from the quarter to which they looked, and descend towards them with flaming swords in their hands, broken short of the point. Their wings were as green as the leaves in spring; and they wore garments equally green, which the fanning of the wings kept in a state of streaming fluctuation behind them as they came. One of them took his stand on a part of the hill just over where the pilgrims stood, and the other on a hill opposite, so that the party in the valley were between them. Dante could discern their heads of hair, notwithstanding its brightness; but their faces were so dazzling as to be undistinguishable.

"They come from Mary's bosom," whispered Sordello, "to protect the valley from the designs of our enemy yonder,—the Serpent."

Dante looked in trepidation towards the only undefended side of the valley, and beheld the Serpent of Eve coming softly among the grass and flowers, occasionally turning its head, and licking its polished back. Before he could take off his eyes from the evil thing, the two angels had come down like falcons, and at the whirring of their pinions the serpent fled. The angels returned as swiftly to their stations.

Aurora was now looking palely over the eastern cliff on the other side of the globe, and the stars of midnight shining over the heads of Dante and his friends, when they seated themselves for rest on the mountain's side. The Florentine, being still in the flesh, lay down for weariness, and was overcome with sleep. In his sleep he dreamt that a golden eagle flashed down like lightning upon him, and bore him up to the region of fire, where the heat was so intense that it woke him, staring and looking round about with a pale face. His dream was a shadowing of the truth. He had actually come to another place,—to the entrance of Purgatory itself. Sordello had been left behind, Virgil alone remained, looking him cheerfully in the face. Saint Lucy had come from heaven, and shortened the fatigue of his journey by carrying him upwards as he slept, the heathen poet following them. On arriving where they stood, the fair saint intimated the entrance of Purgatory to Virgil by a glance thither of her beautiful eyes, and then vanished as Dante woke.[18]

The portal by which Purgatory was entered was embedded in a cliff. It had three steps, each of a different colour; and on the highest of these there sat, mute and watching, an angel in ash-coloured garments, holding a naked sword, which glanced with such intolerable brightness on Dante, whenever he attempted to look, that he gave up the endeavour. The angel demanded who they were, and receiving the right answer, gently bade them advance.

Dante now saw, that the lowest step was of marble, so white and clear that he beheld his face in it. The colour of the next was a deadly black, and it was all rough, scorched, and full of cracks. The third was of flaming porphyry, red as a man's blood when it leaps forth under the lancet.[19] The angel, whose feet were on the porphyry, sat on a threshold which appeared to be rock-diamond. Dante, ascending the steps, with the encouragement of Virgil, fell at the angel's feet, and, after thrice beating himself on the breast, humbly asked admittance. The angel, with the point of his sword, inscribed the first letter of the word peccatum (sin) seven times on the petitioner's forehead; then, bidding him pray with tears for their erasement, and be cautious how he looked back, opened the portal with a silver and a golden key.[20] The hinges roared, as they turned, like thunder; and the pilgrims, on entering, thought they heard, mingling with the sound, a chorus of voices singing, "We praise thee, O God!"[21] It was like the chant that mingles with a cathedral organ, when the words that the choristers utter are at one moment to be distinguished, and at another fade away.

The companions continued ascending till they reached a plain. It stretched as far as the eye could see, and was as lonely as roads across deserts.

This was the first flat, or table-land, of the ascending gradations of Purgatory, and the place of trial for the souls of the Proud. It was bordered with a mound, or natural wall, of white marble, sculptured all over with stories of humility. Dante beheld among them the Annunciation, represented with so much life, that the sweet action of the angel seemed to be uttering the very word, "Hail!" and the submissive spirit of the Virgin to be no less impressed, like very wax, in her demeanour. The next story was that of David dancing and harping before the ark,—an action in which he seemed both less and greater than a king. Michal was looking out upon him from a window, like a lady full of scorn and sorrow. Next to the story of David was that of the Emperor Trajan, when he did a thing so glorious, as moved St. Gregory to gain the greatest of all his conquests—the delivering of the emperor's soul from hell.

A widow, in tears and mourning, was laying hold of his bridle as he rode amidst his court with a noise of horses and horsemen, while the Roman eagles floated in gold over his head. The miserable creature spoke out loudly among them all, crying for vengeance on the murderers of her sons. The emperor seemed to say, "Wait till I return."

But she, in the hastiness of her misery, said, "Suppose thou returnest not?"

"Then my successor will attend to thee," replied the emperor.

"And what hast thou to do with the duties of another man," cried she, "if thou attendest not to thine own?"

"Now, be of good comfort," concluded Trajan, "for verily my duty shall be done before I go; justice wills it, and pity arrests me."

Dante was proceeding to delight himself further with these sculptures, when Virgil whispered hint to look round and see what was coming. He did so, and beheld strange figures advancing, the nature of which he could not make out at first, for they seemed neither human, nor aught else which he could call to mind. They were souls of the proud, bent double under enormous burdens.

"O proud, miserable, woe-begone Christians!" exclaims the poet; "ye who, in the shortness of your sight, see no reason for advancing in the right path! Know ye not that we are worms, born to compose the angelic butterfly, provided we throw off the husks that impede our flight?"[22]

The souls came slowly on, each bending down in proportion to his burden. They looked like the crouching figures in architecture that are used to support roofs or balconies, and that excite piteous fancies in the beholders. The one that appeared to have the most patience, yet seemed as if he said, "I can endure no further."

The sufferers, notwithstanding their anguish, raised their voices in a paraphrase on the Lord's Prayer, which they concluded with humbly stating, that they repeated the clause against temptation, not for themselves, but for those who were yet living.

Virgil, wishing them a speedy deliverance, requested them to spew the best way of going up to the next circle. Who it was that answered him could not be discerned, on account of their all being so bent down; but a voice gave them the required direction; the speaker adding, that he wished he could raise his eyes, so as to see the living creature that stood near him. He said that his name was Omberto—that he came of the great Tuscan race of Aldobrandesco—and that his countrymen, the Siennese, murdered him on account of his arrogance.

Dante had bent down his own head to listen, and in so doing he was recognised by one of the sufferers, who, eyeing him as well as he could, addressed him by name. The poet replied by exclaiming, "Art thou not Oderisi, the glory of Agubbio, the master of the art of illumination?"

"Ah!" said Oderisi, "Franco of Bologna has all the glory now. His colours make the pages of books laugh with beauty, compared with what mine do.[23] I could not have owned it while on earth, for the sin which has brought me hither; but so it is; and so will it ever be, let a man's fame be never so green and flourishing, unless he can secure a dull age to come after him. Cimabue, in painting, lately kept the field against all comers, and now the cry is 'Giotto.' Thus, in song, a new Guido has deprived the first of his glory, and he perhaps is born who shall drive both out of the nest.[24] Fame is but a wind that changes about from all quarters. What does glory amount to at best, that a man should prefer living and growing old for it, to dying in the days of his nurse and his pap-boat, even if it should last him a thousand years? A thousand years!—the twinkling of an eye. Behold this man, who weeps before me; his name resounded once over all our Tuscany, and now it is scarcely whispered in his native place. He was lord there at the time that your once proud but now loathsome Florence had such a lesson given to its frenzy at the battle of Arbia."

"And what is his name?" inquired Dante.

"Salvani," returned the limner. "He is here, because he had the presumption to think that he could hold Sienna in the hollow of his hand. Fifty years has he paced in this manner. Such is the punishment for audacity."

"But why is he here at all," said Dante, "and not in the outer region, among the delayers of repentance?"

"Because," exclaimed the other, "in the height of his ascendancy he did not disdain to stand in the public place in Sienna, and, trembling in every vein, beg money from the people to ransom a friend from captivity. Do I appear to thee to speak with mysterious significance? Thy countrymen shall too soon help thee to understand me."[25]

Virgil now called Dante away from Oderisi, and bade him notice the ground on which they were treading. It was pavement, wrought all over with figures, like sculptured tombstones. There was Lucifer among them, struck flaming down from heaven; and Briareus, pinned to the earth with the thunderbolt, and, with the other giants, amazing the gods with his hugeness; and Nimrod, standing confounded at the foot of Babel; and Niobe, with her despairing eyes, turned into stone amidst her children; and Saul, dead on his own sword in Gilboa; and Arachne, now half spider, at fault on her own broken web; and Rehoboam, for all his insolence, flying in terror in his chariot; and Alcmæon, who made his mother pay with her life for the ornament she received to betray his father; and Sennacherib, left dead by his son in the temple; and the head of Cyrus, thrown by the motherless woman into the goblet of blood, that it might swill what it had thirsted for; and Holofernes, beheaded; and his Assyrians flying at his death; and Troy, all become cinders and hollow places. Oh! what a fall from pride was there! Now, maintain the loftiness of your looks, ye sons of Eve, and walk with proud steps, bending not your eyes on the dust ye were, lest ye perceive the evil of your ways.[26]

"Behold," said Virgil, "there is an angel coming."

The angel came on, clad in white, with a face that sent trembling beams before it, like the morning star. He skewed the pilgrims the way up to the second circle; and then, beating his wings against the forehead of Dante, on which the seven initials of sin were written, told him he should go safely, and disappeared.

On reaching the new circle, Dante, instead of the fierce wailings that used to meet him at every turn in hell, heard voices singing, "Blessed are the poor in spirit."[27] As he went, he perceived that he walked lighter, and was told by Virgil that the angel had freed him from one of the letters on his forehead. He put his hand up to make sure, as a man does in the street when people take notice of something on his head of which he is not aware; and Virgil smiled.

In this new circle the sin of Envy was expiated. After the pilgrims had proceeded a mile, they heard the voices of invisible spirits passing them, uttering sentiments of love and charity; for it was charity itself that had to punish envy.

The souls of the envious, clad in sackcloth, sat leaning for support and humiliation, partly against the rocky wall of the circle, and partly on one another's shoulders, after the manner of beggars that ask alms near places of worship. Their eyes were sewn up, like those of hawks in training, but not so as to hinder them from shedding tears, which they did in abundance; and they cried, "Mary, pray for us!—Michael, Peter, and all the saints, pray for us!"

Dante spoke to them; and one, a female, lifted up her chin as a blind person does when expressing consciousness of notice, and said she was Sapia of Sienna, who used to be pleased at people's misfortunes, and had rejoiced when her countrymen lost the battle of Colle. "Sapia was my name," she said, "but sapient I was not[28], for I prayed God to defeat my countrymen; and when he had done so (as he had willed to do), I raised my bold face to heaven, and cried out to him, 'Now do thy worst, for I fear thee not!' I was like the bird in the fable, who thought the fine day was to last for ever. What I should have done in my latter days to make up for the imperfect amends of my repentance, I know not, if the holy Piero Pettignano had not assisted me with his prayers. But who art thou that goest with open eyes, and breathest in thy talk?"

"Mine eyes," answered Dante, "may yet have to endure the blindness in this place, though for no long period. Far more do I fear the sufferings in the one that I have just left. I seem to feel the weight already upon me."[29]

The Florentine then informed Sapia how he came thither, which, she said, was a great sign that God loved him; and she begged his prayers. The conversation excited the curiosity of two spirits who overheard it; and one of them, Guido del Duca, a noble Romagnese, asked the poet of what country he was. Dante, without mentioning the name of the river, intimated that he came from the banks of the Arno; upon which the other spirit, Rinier da Calboli, asked his friend why the stranger suppressed the name, as though it was something horrible. Guido said he well might; for the river, throughout its course, beheld none but bad men and persecutors of virtue. First, he said, it made its petty way by the sties of those brutal hogs, the people of Casentino, and then arrived at the dignity of watering the kennels of the curs of Arezzo, who excelled more in barking than in biting; then, growing unluckier as it grew larger, like the cursed and miserable ditch that it was, it found in Florence the dogs become wolves; and finally, ere it went into the sea, it passed the den of those foxes, the Pisans, who were full of such cunning that they held traps in contempt.

"It will be well," continued Guido, "for this man to remember what he hears;" and then, after prophesying evil to Florence, and confessing to Dante his sin of envy, which used to make him pale when any one looked happy, he added, "This is Rinieri, the glory of that house of Calboli which now inherits not a spark of it. Not a spark of it, did I say, in the house of Calboli? Where is there a spark in all Romagna? Where is the good Lizio?—where Manardi, Traversaro, Carpigna? The Romagnese have all become bastards. A mechanic founds a house in Bologna! a Bernardin di Fosco finds his dog-grass become a tree in Faenza! Wonder not, Tuscan, to see me weep, when I think of the noble spirits that we have lived with—of the Guidos of Prata, and the Ugolins of Azzo—of Federigo Tignoso and his band—of the Traversaros and Anastagios, families now ruined—and all the ladies and the cavaliers, the alternate employments and delights which wrapped us in a round of love and courtesy, where now there is nothing but ill-will! O castle of Brettinoro! why dost thou not fall? Well has the lord of Bagnacavallo done, who will have no more children. Who would propagate a race of Counties from such blood as the Castrocaros and the Conios? Is not the son of Pagani called the Demon? and would it not be better that such a son were swept out of the family? Nay, let him live to chew to what a pitch of villany it has arrived. Ubaldini alone is blest, for his name is good, and he is too old to leave a child after him. Go, Tuscan—go; for I would be left to my tears."

Dante and Virgil turned to move onward, and had scarcely done so, when a tremendous voice met them, splitting the air like peals of thunder, and crying out, "Whoever finds me will slay me!" then dashed apart, like the thunder-bolt when it falls. It was Cain. The air had scarcely recovered its silence, when a second crash ensued from a different quarter near them, like thunder when the claps break swiftly into one another. "I am Aglauros," it said, "that was turned into stone." Dante drew closer to his guide, and there ensued a dead silence.[30]

The sun was now in the west, and the pilgrims were journeying towards it, when Dante suddenly felt such a weight of splendour on his eyes, as forced him to screen them with both his hands. It was an angel coming to show them the ascent to the next circle, a way that was less steep than the last. While mounting, they heard the angel's voice singing behind them, "Blessed are the merciful; for they shall obtain mercy!" and on his leaving them to proceed by themselves, the second letter on Dante's forehead was found to have been effaced by the splendour.

The poet looked round in wonder on the new circle, where the sin of Anger was expiated, and beheld, as in a dream, three successive spectacles illustrative of the virtue of patience. The first was that of a crowded temple, on the threshold of which a female said to her son, in the sweet manner of a mother, "Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing:"[31]—and here she became silent, and the vision ended. The next was the lord of Athens, Pisistratus, calmly reproving his wife for wishing him to put to death her daughter's lover, who, in a transport, had embraced her in public. "If we are to be thus severe," said Pisistratus, "with those that love us, what is to be done with such as hate?" The last spectacle was that of a furious multitude shouting and stoning to death a youth, who, as he fell to the ground, still kept his face towards heaven, making his eyes the gates through which his soul reached it, and imploring forgiveness for his murderers.[32]

The visions passed away, leaving the poet staggering as if but half awake. They were succeeded by a thick and noisome fog, through which he followed his leader with the caution of a blind man, Virgil repeatedly telling him not to quit him a moment. Here they heard voices praying in unison for pardon to the "Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world." They were the spirits of the angry. Dante conversed with one of them on free-will and necessity; and after quitting him, and issuing by degrees from the cloud, beheld illustrative visions of anger; such as the impious mother, who was changed into the bird that most delights in singing; Haman, retaining his look of spite and rage on the cross; and Lavinia, mourning for her mother, who slew herself for rage at the death of Turnus.[33]

These visions were broken off by a great light, as sleep is broken; and Dante heard a voice out of it saying, "The ascent is here." He then, as Virgil and he ascended into the fourth circle, felt an air on his face, as if caused by the fanning of wings, accompanied by the utterance of the words, "Blessed are the peace-makers;" and his forehead was lightened of the third letter.[34]

In this fourth circle was expiated Lukewarmness, or defect of zeal for good. The sufferers came speeding and weeping round the mountain, making amends for the old indifference by the haste and fire of the new love that was in them. "Blessed Mary made haste," cried one, "to salute Elizabeth." "And Cæsar," cried another, "to smite Pompey at Lerida."[35] "And the disobedient among the Israelites," cried others, "died before they reached the promised land." "And the tired among the Trojans preferred ease in Sicily to glory in Latium."—It was now midnight, and Dante slept and had a dream.

His dream was of a woman who came to him, having a tongue that tried ineffectually to speak, squinting eyes, feet whose distortion drew her towards the earth, stumps of hands, and a pallid face. Dante looked earnestly at her, and his look acted upon her like sunshine upon cold. Her tongue was loosened; her feet made straight; she stood upright; her paleness became a lovely rose-colour; and she warbled so beautifully, that the poet could not have refused to listen had he wished it.

"I am the sweet Syren," she said, "who made the mariners turn pale for pleasure in the sea. I drew Ulysses out of his course with my song; and he that harbours with me once, rarely departs ever, so well I pay him for what he abandons."

Her lips were not yet closed, when a lady of holy and earliest countenance came up to shame her. "O Virgil!" she cried angrily, "who is this?" Virgil approached, with his eyes fixed on the lady; and the lady tore away the garments of the woman, and spewed her to be a creature so loathly, that the sleeper awoke with the horror.[36]

Virgil said, "I have called thee three times to no purpose. Let us move, and find the place at which we are to go higher."

It was broad day, with a sun that came warm on the shoulders; and Dante was proceeding with his companion, when the softest voice they ever heard directed them where to ascend, and they found an angel with them, who pointed his swan-like wings upward, and then flapped them against the pilgrims, taking away the fourth letter from the forehead of Dante. "Blessed are they that mourn," said the angel, "for they shall be comforted."

The pilgrims ascended into the fifth circle, and beheld the expiators of Avarice grovelling on the ground, and exclaiming, as loud as they could for the tears that choked them, "My soul hath cleaved to the dust." Dante spoke to one, who turned out to be Pope Adrian the Fifth. The poet fell on his knees; but Adrian bade him arise and err not. "I am no longer," said he, "spouse of the Church, here; but fellow-servant with thee and with all others. Go thy ways, and delay not the time of my deliverance."

The pilgrims moving onward, Dante heard a spirit exclaim, in the struggling tones of a woman in child-bed, "O blessed Virgin! That was a poor roof thou hadst when thou wast delivered of thy sacred burden. O good Fabricius! Virtue with poverty was thy choice, and not vice with riches." And then it told the story of Nicholas, who, hearing that a father was about to sacrifice the honour of his three daughters for want of money, threw bags of it in at his window, containing portions for them all.

Dante earnestly addressed this spirit to know who he was; and the spirit said it would tell him, not for the sake of help, for which it looked elsewhere, but because of the shining grace that was in his questioner, though yet alive.

"I was root," said the spirit, "of that evil plant which overshadows all Christendom to such little profit. Hugh Capet was I, ancestor of the Philips and Louises of France, offspring of a butcher of Paris, when the old race of kings was worn out.[37] We began by seizing the government in Paris; then plundered in Provence; then, to make amends, laid hold of Poitou, Normandy, and Gascony; then, still to make amends, put Conradin to death and seized Naples; then, always to make amends, gave Saint Aquinas his dismissal to Heaven by poison. I see the time at hand when a descendant of mine will be called into Italy, and the spear that Judas jousted with[38] shall transfix the bowels of Florence. Another of my posterity sells his daughter for a sum of money to a Marquis of Ferrara. Another seizes the pope in Alagna, and mocks Christ over again in the person of his Vicar. A fourth rends the veil of the temple, solely to seize its money. O Lord, how shall I rejoice to see the vengeance which even now thou huggest in delight to thy bosom![39]

"Of loving and liberal things," continued Capet, "we speak while it is light; such as thou heardest me record, when I addressed myself to the blessed Virgin. But when night comes, we take another tone. Then we denounce Pygmalion,[39] the traitor, the robber, and the parricide, each the result of his gluttonous love of gold; and Midas, who obtained his wish, to the laughter of all time; and the thief Achan, who still seems frightened at the wrath of Joshua; and Sapphira and her husband, whom we accuse over again before the Apostles; and Heliodorus, whom we bless the hoofs of the angel's horse for trampling;[40] and Crassus, on whom we call with shouts of derision to tell us the flavour of his molten gold. Thus we record our thoughts in the night-time, now high, now low, now at greater or less length, as each man is prompted by his impulses. And it was thus thou didst hear me recording also by day-time, though I had no respondent near me."

The pilgrims quitted Hugh Capet, and were eagerly pursuing their journey, when, to the terror of Dante, they felt the whole mountain of Purgatory tremble, as though it were about to fall in. The island of Delos shook not so awfully when Latona, hiding there, brought forth the twin eyes of Heaven. A shout then arose on every side, so enormous, that Virgil stood nigher to his companion, and bade him be of good heart. "Glory be to God in the highest," cried the shout; but Dante could gather the words only from those who were near him.

It was Purgatory rejoicing for the deliverance of a soul out of its bounds.[41]

The soul overtook the pilgrims as they were journeying in amazement onwards; and it turned out to be that of Statius, who had been converted to Christianity in the reign of Domitian.[42] Mutual astonishment led to inquiries that explained who the other Latin poet was; and Statius fell at his master's feet.

Statius had expiated his sins in the circle of Avarice, not for that vice, but for the opposite one of Prodigality.

An angel now, as before, took the fifth letter from Dante's forehead; and the three poets having ascended into the sixth round of the mountain, were journeying on lovingly together, Dante listening with reverence to the talk of the two ancients, when they came up to a sweet-smelling fruit-tree, upon which a clear stream came tumbling from a rock beside it, and diffusing itself through the branches. The Latin poets went up to the tree, and were met by a voice which said, "Be chary of the fruit. Mary thought not of herself at Galilee, but of the visitors, when she said, 'They have no wine.' The women of oldest Rome drank water. The beautiful age of gold feasted on acorns. Its thirst made nectar out of the rivulet. The Baptist fed on locusts and wild honey, and became great as you see him in the gospel."

The poets went on their way; and Dante was still listening to the others, when they heard behind them a mingled sound of chanting and weeping, which produced an effect at once sad and delightful. It was the psalm, "O Lord, open thou our lips!" and the chanters were expiators of the sin of Intemperance in Meats and Drinks. They were condemned to circuit the mountain, famished, and to long for the fruit and waters of the tree in vain. They soon came up with the poets—a pallid multitude, with hollow eyes, and bones staring through the skin. The sockets of their eyes looked like rings from which the gems had dropped.[43] One of them knew and accosted Dante, who could not recognise him till he heard him speak. It was Forese Donati, one of the poet's most intimate connexions. Dante, who had wept over his face when dead, could as little forbear weeping to see him thus hungering and thirsting, though he had expected to find him in the outskirts of the place, among the delayers of repentance. He asked his friend how he had so quickly got higher. Forese said it was owing to the prayers and tears of his good wife Nella; and then he burst into a strain of indignation against the contrast exhibited to her virtue by the general depravity of the Florentine women, whom he described as less modest than the half-naked savages in the mountains of Sardinia.

"What is to be said of such creatures?" continued he. "O my dear cousin! I see a day at hand, when these impudent women shall be for bidden from the pulpit to go exposing their naked bosoms. What savages or what infidels ever needed that? Oh! if they could see what Heaven has in store for them, their mouths would be this instant opened wide for howling."[44]

Forese then asked Dante to explain to himself and his astonished fellow-sufferers how it was that he stood there, a living body of flesh and blood, casting a shadow with his substance.

"If thou callest to mind," said Dante, "what sort of life thou and I led together, the recollection may still grieve thee sorely. He that walks here before us took me out of that life; and through his guidance it is that I have visited in the body the world of the dead, and am now traversing the mountain which leads us to the right path."[45]

After some further explanation, Forese pointed out to his friend, among the expiators of intemperance, Buonaggiunta of Lucca, the poet; and Pope Martin the Fourth, with a face made sharper than the rest for the eels which he used to smother in wine; and Ubaldino of Pila, grinding his teeth on air; and Archbishop Boniface of Ravenna, who fed jovially on his flock; and Rigogliosi of Forli, who had had time enough to drink in the other world, and yet never was satisfied. Buonaggiunta and Dante eyed one another with curiosity; and the former murmured something about a lady of the name of Gentucca.

"Thou seemest to wish to speak with me," said Dante.

"Thou art no admirer, I believe, of my native place," said Buonaggiunta; "and yet, if thou art he whom I take thee to be, there is a damsel there shall make it please thee. Art thou not author of the poem beginning

"Ladies, that understand the lore of love?"[46]

"I am one," replied Dante, "who writes as Love would have him, heeding no manner but his dictator's, and uttering simply what he suggests."[47]

"Ay, that is the sweet new style," returned Buonaggiunta; "and I now see what it was that hindered the notary, and Guittone, and myself, from hitting the right natural point." And here he ceased speaking, looking like one contented to have ascertained a truth.[48]

The whole multitude then, except Forese, skimmed away like cranes, swift alike through eagerness and through leanness. Forese lingered a moment to have a parting word with his friend, and to prophesy the violent end of the chief of his family, Corso, run away with and dragged at the heels of his horse faster and faster, till the frenzied animal smites him dead. Having given the poet this information, the prophet speeded after the others.

The companions now came to a second fruit-tree, to which a multitude were in vain lifting up their hands, just as children lift them to a man who tantalises them with shewing something which he withholds; but a voice out of a thicket by the road-side warned the travellers not to stop, telling them that the tree was an offset from that of which Eve tasted. "Call to mind," said the voice, "those creatures of the clouds, the Centaurs, whose feasting cost them their lives. Remember the Hebrews, how they dropped away from the ranks of Gideon to quench their effeminate thirst."[49]

The poets proceeded, wrapt in thought, till they heard another voice of a nature that made Dante start and shake as if he had been some paltry hackney.

"Of what value is thought," said the voice, "if it lose its way? The path lies hither."

Dante turned toward the voice, and beheld a shape glowing red as in a furnace, with a visage too dazzling to be looked upon. It met him, nevertheless, as he drew nigh, with an air from the fanning of its wings fresh as the first breathing of the wind on a May morning, and fragrant as all its flowers; and Dante lost the sixth letter on his forehead, and ascended with the two other poets into the seventh and last circle of the mountain.

This circle was all in flames, except a narrow path on the edge of its precipice, along which the pilgrims walked. A great wind from outside of the precipice kept the flames from raging beyond the path; and in the midst of the fire went spirits expiating the sin of Incontinence. They sang the hymn beginning "God of consummate mercy!"[50] Dante was compelled to divide his attention between his own footsteps and theirs, in order to move without destruction. At the close of the hymn they cried aloud, "I know not a man!"[51] and then recommenced it; after which they again cried aloud, saying, "Diana ran to the wood, and drove Calisto out of it, because she knew the poison of Venus!" And then again they sang the hymn, and then extolled the memories of chaste women and husbands; and so they went on without ceasing, as long as their time of trial lasted.

Occasionally the multitude that went in one direction met another which mingled with and passed through it, individuals of both greeting tenderly by the way, as emmets appear to do, when in passing they touch the antennæ of one another. These two multitudes parted with loud and sorrowful cries, proclaiming the offences of which they had been guilty; and then each renewed their spiritual songs and prayers.

The souls here, as in former circles, knew Dante to be a living creature by the shadow which he cast; and after the wonted explanations, he learned who some of them were. One was his predecessor in poetry, Guido Guinicelli, from whom he could not take his eyes for love and reverence, till the sufferer, who told him there was a greater than himself in the crowd, vanished away through the fire as a fish does in water. The greater one was Arnauld Daniel, the Provençal poet, who, after begging the prayers of the traveller, disappeared in like manner.

The sun by this time was setting on the fires of Purgatory, when an angel came crossing the road through them, and then, standing on the edge of the precipice, with joy in his looks, and singing, "Blessed are the pure in heart!" invited the three poets to plunge into the flames themselves, and so cross the road to the ascent by which the summit of the mountain was gained. Dante, clasping his hands, and raising them aloft, recoiled in horror. The thought of all that he had just witnessed made him feel as if his own hour of death was come. His companion encouraged him to obey the angel; but he could not stir. Virgil said, "Now mark me, son; this is the only remaining obstacle between thee and Beatrice;" and then himself and Statius entering the fire, Dante followed them.

"I could have cast myself," said he, "into molten glass to cool myself, so raging was the furnace." Virgil talked of Beatrice to animate him. He said, "Methinks I see her eyes beholding us." There was, indeed, a great light upon the quarter to which they were crossing; and out of the light issued a voice, which drew them onwards, singing, "Come, blessed of my Father! Behold, the sun is going down, and the night cometh, and the ascent is to be gained."

The travellers gained the ascent, issuing out of the fire; and the voice and the light ceased, and night was come. Unable to ascend farther in the darkness, they made themselves a bed, each of a stair in the rock; and Dante, in his happy humility, felt as if he had been a goat lying down for the night near two shepherds.

Towards dawn, at the hour of the rising of the star of love, he had a dream, in which he saw a young and beautiful lady coming over a lea, and bending every now and then to gather flowers; and as she bound the flowers into a garland, she sang, "I am Leah, gathering flowers to adorn myself, that my looks may seem pleasant to me in the mirror. But my sister Rachel abides before the mirror, flowerless; contented with her beautiful eyes. To behold is my sister's pleasure, and to work is mine."[52]

When Dante awoke, the beams of the dawn were visible; and they now produced a happiness like that of the traveller, who every time he awakes knows himself to be nearer home. Virgil and Statius were already up; and all three, resuming their way to the mountain's top, stood upon it at last, and gazed round about them on the skirts of the terrestrial Paradise. The sun was sparkling bright over a green land, full of trees and flowers. Virgil then announced to Dante, that here his guidance terminated, and that the creature of flesh and blood was at length to be master of his own movements, to rest or to wander as he pleased, the tried and purified lord over himself.

The Florentine, eager to taste his new liberty, left his companions awhile, and strolled away through the celestial forest, whose thick and lively verdure gave coolness to the senses in the midst of the brightest sun. A fragrance came from every part of the soil; a sweet unintermitting air streamed against the walker's face; and as the full-hearted birds, warbling on all sides, welcomed the morning's radiance into the trees, the trees themselves joined in the concert with a swelling breath, like that which rises among the pines of Chiassi, when Eolus lets loose the south-wind, and the gathering melody comes rolling through the forest from bough to bough.[53]

Dante had proceeded far enough to lose sight of the point at which he entered, when he found himself on the bank of a rivulet, compared with whose crystal purity the limpidest waters on earth were clouded. And yet it flowed under a perpetual depth of shade, which no beam either of sun or moon penetrated. Nevertheless the darkness was coloured with endless diversities of May-blossoms; and the poet was standing in admiration, looking up at it along its course, when he beheld something that took away every other thought; to wit, a lady, all alone, on the other side of the water, singing and culling flowers.

"Ah, lady!" said the poet, "who, to judge by the cordial beauty in thy looks, hast a heart overflowing with love, be pleased to draw thee nearer to the stream, that I may understand the words thou singest. Thou remindest me of Proserpine, of the place she was straying in, and of what sort of creature she looked, when her mother lost her, and she herself lost the spring-time on earth."

As a lady turns in the dance when it goes smoothest, moving round with lovely self-possession, and scarcely seeming to put one foot before the other, so turned the lady towards the water over the yellow and vermilion flowers, dropping her eyes gently as she came, and singing so that Dante could hear her. Then when she arrived at the water, she stopped, and raised her eyes towards him, and smiled, shewing him the flowers in her hands, and shifting them with her fingers into a display of all their beauties. Never were such eyes beheld, not even when Venus herself was in love. The stream was a little stream; yet Dante felt it as great an intervention between them, as if it had been Leander's Hellespont.

The lady explained to him the nature of the place, and how the rivulet was the Lethe of Paradise;—Lethe, where he stood, but called Eunoe higher up; the drink of the one doing away all remembrance of evil deeds, and that of the other restoring all remembrance of good.[54] It was the region, she said, in which Adam and Eve had lived; and the poets had beheld it perhaps in their dreams on Mount Parnassus, and hence imagined their golden age;—and at these words she looked at Virgil and Statius, who by this time had come up, and who stood smiling at her kindly words.

Resuming her song, the lady turned and passed up along the rivulet the contrary way of the stream, Dante proceeding at the same rate of time on his side of it; till on a sudden she cried, "Behold, and listen!" and a light of exceeding lustre came streaming through the woods, followed by a dulcet melody. The poets resumed their way in a rapture of expectation, and saw the air before them glowing under the green boughs like fire. A divine spectacle ensued of holy mystery, with evangelical and apocalyptic images, which gradually gave way and disclosed a car brighter than the chariot of the sun, accompanied by celestial nymphs, and showered upon by angels with a cloud of flowers, in the midst of which stood a maiden in a white veil, crowned with olive.

The love that had never left Dante's heart from childhood told him who it was; and trembling in every vein, he turned round to Virgil for encouragement. Virgil was gone. At that moment, Paradise and Beatrice herself could not requite the pilgrim for the loss of his friend; and the tears ran down his cheeks.

"Dante," said the veiled maiden across the stream, "weep not that Virgil leaves thee. Weep thou not yet. The stroke of a sharper sword is coming, at which it will behove thee to weep." Then assuming a sterner attitude, and speaking in the tone of one who reserves the bitterest speech for the last, she added, "Observe me well. I am, as thou suspectest, Beatrice indeed;—Beatrice, who has to congratulate thee on deigning to seek the mountain at last. And hadst thou so long indeed to learn, that here only can man be happy?"

Dante, casting down his eyes at these words, beheld his face in the water, and hastily turned aside, he saw it so full of shame.

Beatrice had the dignified manner of an offended parent; such a flavour of bitterness was mingled with her pity.

She held her peace; and the angels abruptly began singing, "In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust;" but went no farther in the psalm than the words, "Thou hast set my feet in a large room." The tears of Dante had hitherto been suppressed; but when the singing began, they again rolled down his cheeks.

Beatrice, in a milder tone, said to the angels, "This man, when he proposed to himself in his youth to lead a new life, was of a truth so gifted, that every good habit ought to have thrived with him; but the richer the soil, the greater peril of weeds. For a while, the innocent light of my countenance drew him the right way; but when I quitted mortal life, he took away his thoughts from remembrance of me, and gave himself to others. When I had risen from flesh to spirit, and increased in worth and beauty, then did I sink in his estimation, and he turned into other paths, and pursued false images of good that never keep their promise. In vain I obtained from Heaven the power of interfering in his behalf, and endeavoured to affect him with it night and day. So little was he concerned, and into such depths he fell, that nothing remained but to shew him the state of the condemned; and therefore I went to their outer regions, and commended him with tears to the guide that brought him hither. The decrees of Heaven would be nought, if Lethe could be passed, and the fruit beyond it tasted, without any payment of remorse.[55]

"O thou," she continued, addressing herself to Dante, "who standest on the other side of the holy stream, say, have I not spoken truth?"

Dante was so confused and penitent, that the words failed as they passed his lips.

"What could induce thee," resumed his monitress, "when I had given thee aims indeed, to abandon them for objects that could end in nothing?"

Dante said, "Thy face was taken from me, and the presence of false pleasure led me astray."

"Never didst thou behold," cried the maiden, "loveliness like mine; and if bliss failed thee because of my death, how couldst thou be allured by mortal inferiority? That first blow should have taught thee to disdain all perishable things, and aspire after the soul that had gone before thee. How could thy spirit endure to stoop to further chances, or to a childish girl, or any other fleeting vanity? The bird that is newly out of the nest may be twice or thrice tempted by the snare; but in vain, surely, is the net spread in sight of one that is older."[56]

Dante stood as silent and abashed as a sorry child.

"If but to hear me," said Beatrice, "thus afflicts thee, lift up thy beard, and see what sight can do."

Dante, though feeling the sting intended by the word "beard," did as he was desired. The angels had ceased to scatter their clouds of flowers about the maiden; and be beheld her, though still beneath her veil, as far surpassing her former self in loveliness, as that self had surpassed others. The sight pierced him with such pangs, that the more he had loved any thing else, the more he now loathed it; and he fell senseless to the ground.

When he recovered his senses, he found himself in the hands of the lady he had first seen in the place, who bidding him keep firm hold of her, drew him into the river Lethe, and so through and across it to the other side, speeding as she went like a weaver's shuttle, and immersing him when she arrived, the angels all the while singing, "Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."[57] She then delivered him into the hands of the nymphs that had danced about the car,—nymphs on earth, but stars and cardinal virtues in heaven; a song burst from the lips of the angels; and Faith, Hope, and Charity, calling upon Beatrice to unveil her face, she did so; and Dante quenched the ten-years thirst of his eyes in her ineffable beauty.[58]

After a while he and Statius were made thoroughly regenerate with the waters of Eunoe; and he felt pure with a new being, and fit to soar into the stars.

[Footnote 1:

"Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro
Che s'accoglieva nel serenoaspetto
De l'aer puro infino al primo giro,
A gli occhi miei ricomincio diletto,
Tosto ch'io usci' fuor de l'aura morta
Che m'avea contristati gli occhi e 'l petto.

Lo bel pianeta, ch'ad amar conforta,
Faceva tutto rider l'oriente,
Velando i Pesci, ch'erano in sua scorta.

Io mi volsi a man destra, e posi mente
All'altro polo, e vidi quattro stelle
Non viste mai, fuor ch'a la prima gente;

Goder pareva 'l ciel di lor fiammelle.
O settentrional vedovo sito,
Poi che privato sei di mirar quelle!"

The sweetest oriental sapphire blue,
Which the whole air in its pure bosom had,
Greeted mine eyes, far as the heavens withdrew;

So that again they felt assured and glad,
Soon as they issued forth from the dead air,
Where every sight and thought had made them sad.

The beauteous star, which lets no love despair,
Made all the orient laugh with loveliness,
Veiling the Fish that glimmered in its hair.

I turned me to the right to gaze and bless,
And saw four more, never of living wight
Beheld, since Adam brought us our distress;

Heaven seemed rejoicing in their happy light.
O widowed northern pole, bereaved indeed,
Since thou hast had no power to see that sight!

Readers who may have gone thus far with the "Italian Pilgrim's Progress," will allow me to congratulate them on arriving at this lovely scene, one of the most admired in the poem.

This is one of the passages which make the religious admirers of Dante inclined to pronounce him divinely inspired; for how could he otherwise have seen stars, they ask us, which were not discovered till after his time, and which compose the constellation of the Cross? But other commentators are of opinion, that the Cross, though not so named till subsequently (and Dante, we see, gives no prophetic hint about the name), had been seen, probably by stray navigators. An Arabian globe is even mentioned by M. Artaud (see Cary), in which the Southern Cross is set down. Mr. Cary, in his note on the passage, refers to Seneca's prediction of the discovery of America; most likely suggested by similar information. "But whatever," he adds, "may be thought of this, it is certain that the four stars are here symbolical of the four cardinal virtues;" and he refers to canto xxxi, where those virtues are retrospectively associated with these stars. The symbol, however, is not, necessary. Dante was a very curious inquirer on all subjects, and evidently acquainted with ships and seamen as well as geography; and his imagination would eagerly have seized a magnificent novelty like this, and used it the first opportunity. Columbus's discovery, as the reader will see, was anticipated by Pulci.]

[Footnote 2: Generous and disinterested!—Cato, the republican enemy of Cæsar, and committer of suicide, is not luckily chosen for his present office by the poet who has put Brutus into the devil's mouth in spite of his agreeing with Cato, and the suicide Piero delle Vigne into hell in spite of his virtues. But Dante thought Cato's austere manners like his own.]

[Footnote 3: The girding with the rush (giunco schietto) is_ supposed by the commentators to be an injunction of simplicity and patience. Perhaps it is to enjoin sincerity; especially as the region of expiation has now been entered, and sincerity is the first step to repentance. It will be recollected that Dante's former girdle, the cord of the Franciscan friars, has been left in the hands of Fraud.]

[Footnote 4:

"L'alba vinceva l'ora mattutina
Che fuggia 'nnanzi, sì che di lontano
Conobbi il tremolar de la marina."

The lingering shadows now began to flee
Before the whitening dawn, so that mine eyes
Discerned far off the trembling of the sea.

"Conobbi il tremolar de la marina"
is a beautiful verse, both for the picture and the sound.]

[Footnote 5: This evidence of humility and gratitude on the part of Dante would be very affecting, if we could forget all the pride and passion he has been shewing elsewhere, and the torments in which he has left his fellow-creatures. With these recollections upon us, it looks like an overweening piece of self-congratulation at other people's expense.]

[Footnote 6:

"Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona
De la mia donna disiosamente,"

is the beginning of the ode sung by Dante's friend. The incident is beautifully introduced; and Casella's being made to select a production from the pen of the man who asks him to sing, very delicately implies a graceful cordiality in the musician's character.

Milton alludes to the passage in his sonnet to Henry Lawes:

"Thou honour'st verse, and verse must lend her wing
To honour thee, the priest of Phoebus' quire,
That tun'st their happiest lines in hymn or story.
Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher
Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing,
Met in the milder shades of Purgatory." ]

[Footnote 7: Manfredi was the natural son of the Emperor Frederick the Second. "He was lively and agreeable in his manners," observes Mr. Cary, "and delighted in poetry, music, and dancing. But he was luxurious and ambitious, void of religion, and in his philosophy an epicurean." Translation of Dante, Smith's edition, p. 77. Thus King Manfredi ought to have been in a red-hot tomb, roasting for ever with Epicurus himself, and with the father of the poet's beloved friend, Guido Cavalcante: but he was the son of an emperor, and a foe to the house of Anjou; so Dante gives him a passport to heaven. There is no ground whatever for the repentance assumed in the text.]

[Footnote 8: The unexpected bit of comedy here ensuing is very remarkable and pleasant. Belacqua, according to an old commentator, was a musician.]

[Footnote 9: Buonconte was the son of that Guido da Montefeltro, whose soul we have seen carried off from St. Francis by a devil, for having violated the conditions of penitence. It is curious that both father and son should have been contested for in this manner.]

[Footnote 10: This is the most affecting and comprehensive of all brief stories.

"Deh quando to sarai tornato al mondo,
E riposato de la lunga via,
Seguitò 'l terzo spirito al secondo,

Ricorditi di me che son la Pia:
Siena mi fè; disfecemi Maremma;
Salsi colui che 'nnanellata pria

Disposando m' avea con la sua gemma."

Ah, when thou findest thee again on earth
(Said then a female soul), remember me,—
Pia. Sienna was my place of birth,

The Marshes of my death. This knoweth he,
Who placed upon my hand the spousal ring.

"Nello della Pietra," says M. Beyle, in his work entitled De l'Amour, "obtained in marriage the hand of Madonna Pia, sole heiress of the Ptolomei, the richest and most noble family of Sienna. Her beauty, which was the admiration of all Tuscany, gave rise to a jealousy in the breast of her husband, that, envenomed by wrong reports and suspicions continually reviving, led to a frightful catastrophe. It is not easy to determine at this day if his wife was altogether innocent; but Dante has represented her as such. Her husband carried her with him into the marshes of Volterra, celebrated then, as now, for the pestiferous effects of the air. Never would he tell his wife the reason of her banishment into so dangerous a place. His pride did not deign to pronounce either complaint or accusation. He lived with her alone, in a deserted tower, of which I have been to see the ruins on the seashore; he never broke his disdainful silence, never replied to the questions of his youthful bride, never listened to her entreaties. He waited, unmoved by her, for the air to produce its fatal effects. The vapours of this unwholesome swamp were not long in tarnishing features the most beautiful, they say, that in that age had appeared upon earth. In a few months she died. Some chroniclers of these remote times report that Nello employed the dagger to hasten her end: she died in the marshes in some horrible manner; but the mode of her death remained a mystery, even to her contemporaries. Nello della Pietra survived, to pass the rest of his days in a silence which was never broken." Hazlitt's Journey through France and Italy, p. 315.]

[Footnote 11: Sordello was a famous Provençal poet; with whose writings the world has but lately been made acquainted through the researches of M. Raynouard, in his Choix des Poésies des Troubadours, &c.]

[Footnote 12: "Fresco smeraldo in l'ora che si fiacca." An exquisite image of newness and brilliancy.]

[Footnote 13: "Salve, Regina:" the beginning of a Roman-Catholic chant to the Virgin.]

[Footnote 14: "With nose deprest," says Mr. Cary. But Dante says, literally, "small nose,"—nasetto. So, further on, he says, "masculine nose,"—maschio naso. He meant to imply the greater or less determination of character, which the size of that feature is supposed to indicate.]

[Footnote 15: An English reader is surprised to find here a sovereign for whom he has been taught to entertain little respect. But Henry was a devout servant of the Church.]

[Footnote 16:

"Era già l'ora che volge 'l desio
A' naviganti, e intenerisce 'l cuore
Lo dì ch' an detto a' dolci amici a Dio;

E che lo nuovo peregrin d'amore
Punge, se ode squilla di lontano
Che paia 'l giorno pianger che si muore."

A famous passage, untiring in the repetition. It is, indeed, worthy to be the voice of Evening herself.

'Twas now the hour, when love of home melts through
Men's hearts at sea, and longing thoughts portray
The moment when they bade sweet friends adieu;
And the new pilgrim now, on his lone way,
Thrills, if he hears the distant vesper-bell,
That seems to mourn for the expiring day.

Every body knows the line in Gray's Elegy, not unworthily echoed from
Dante's—

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day."

Nothing can equal, however, the tone in the Italian original,—the

"Pàia 'l giorno pianger the si muòre."

Alas! why could not the great Tuscan have been superior enough to his personal griefs to write a whole book full of such beauties, and so have left us a work truly to be called Divine?]

[Footnote 17:

"Te lucis ante terminum;"—a hymn sung at evening service.]

[Footnote 18: Lucy, Lucia (supposed to be derived from lux, lucis), is the goddess (I was almost going to say) who in Roman Catholic countries may be said to preside over light, and who is really invoked in maladies of the eyes. She was Dante's favourite saint, possibly for that reason among others, for he had once hurt his eyes with study, and they had been cured. In her spiritual character she represents the light of grace.]

[Footnote 19: The first step typifies consciousness of sin; the second, horror of it; the third, zeal to amend.]

[Footnote 20: The keys of St. Peter. The gold is said by the commentators to mean power to absolve; the silver, the learning and judgment requisite to use it.]

[Footnote 21: "Te Deum laudamus," the well-known hymn of St. Ambrose and
St. Augustine.]

[Footnote 22:

"Non v'accorgete voi, che noi siam vermi,
Nati a formar l'angelica farfalla,
Che vola a giustizia senza schermi?"

"Know you not, we are worms
Born to compose the angelic butterfly,
That flies to heaven when freed from what deforms?"

[Footnote 23:

"Più ridon le carte
Che penelleggia Franco Bolognese:
L'onore è tutto or suo, e mio in parte."

[Footnote 24: The "new Guido" is his friend Guido Cavalcante (now dead); the "first" is Guido Guinicelli, for whose writings Dante had an esteem; and the poet, who is to "chase them from the nest," caccerà di nido (as the not very friendly metaphor states it), is with good reason supposed to be himself! He was right; but was the statement becoming? It was certainly not necessary. Dante, notwithstanding his friendship with Guido, appears to have had a grudge against both the Cavalcanti, probably for some scorn they had shewn to his superstition; far they could be proud themselves; and the son has the reputation of scepticism, as well as the father. See the Decameron, Giorn. vi. Nov. 9.]

[Footnote 25: This is the passage from which it is conjectured that Dante knew what it was to "tremble in every vein," from the awful necessity of begging. Mr. Cary, with some other commentators, thinks that the "trembling" implies fear of being refused. But does it not rather mean the agony of the humiliation? In Salvani's case it certainly does; for it was in consideration of the pang to his pride, that the good deed rescued him from worse punishment.]

[Footnote 26: The reader will have noticed the extraordinary mixture of Paganism and the Bible in this passage, especially the introduction of such fables as Niobe and Arachne. It would be difficult not to suppose it intended to work out some half sceptical purpose, if we did not call to mind the grave authority given to fables in the poet's treatise on Monarchy, and the whole strange spirit, at once logical and gratuitous, of the learning of his age, when the acuter the mind, the subtler became the reconcilement with absurdity.]

[Footnote 27: Beati pauperes spiritu. "Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"—one of the beautiful passages of the beautiful sermon on the Mount. How could the great poet read and admire such passages, and yet fill his books so full of all which they renounced? "Oh," say his idolators, "he did it out of his very love for them, and his impatience to see them triumph." So said the Inquisition. The evil was continued for the sake of the good which it prevented! The result in the long-run may be so, but not for the reasons they supposed, or from blindness to the indulgence of their bad passions.]

[Footnote 28:

"Sàvia non fui, avvegna che Sapìa Fosse chiamata." The pun is poorer even than it sounds in English: for though the Italian name may possibly remind its readers of sapienza (sapience), there is the difference of a v in the adjective savia, which is also accented on the first syllable. It is almost as bad as if she had said in English, "Sophist I found myself, though Sophia is my name." It is pleasant, however, to see the great saturnine poet among the punsters.—It appears, from the commentators, that Sapia was in exile at the time of the battle, but they do not say for what; probably from some zeal of faction]

[Footnote 29: We are here let into Dante's confessions. He owns to a little envy, but far more pride:

"Gli occhi, diss' io, mi fieno ancor qui tolti,
Ma picciol tempo; che poch' è l'offesa
Fatta per esser con invidia volti.
Troppa è più la paura ond' è sospesa
L'anima mia del tormento di sotto
Che già lo 'ncarco di là giù mi pesa."

The first confession is singularly ingenuous and modest; the second, affecting. It is curious to guess what sort of persons Dante could have allowed himself to envy—probably those who were more acceptable to women.]

[Footnote 29: Aglauros, daughter of Cecrops, king of Athens, was turned to stone by Mercury, for disturbing with her envy his passion for her sister Herse.

The passage about Cain is one of the sublimest in Dante. Truly wonderful and characteristic is the way in which he has made physical noise and violence express the anguish of the wanderer's mind. We are not to suppose, I conceive, that we see Cain. We know he has passed us, by his thunderous and headlong words. Dante may well make him invisible, for his words are things—veritable thunderbolts.

Cain comes in rapid successions of thunder-claps. The voice of Aglauros is thunder-claps crashing into one another—broken thunder. This is exceedingly fine also, and wonderful as a variation upon that awful music; but Cain is the astonishment and the overwhelmingness. If it were not, however, for the second thunder, we should not have had the two silences; for I doubt whether they are not better even than one. At all events, the final silence is tremendous.]

[Footnote 30: St. Luke ii. 48.]

[Footnote 31: The stoning of Stephen.]

[Footnote 32: These illustrative spectacles are not among the best inventions of Dante. Their introduction is forced, and the instances not always pointed. A murderess, too, of her son, changed into such a bird as the nightingale, was not a happy association of ideas in Homer, where Dante found it; and I am surprised he made use of it, intimate as he must have been with the less inconsistent story of her namesake, Philomela, in the Metamorphoses.]

[Footnote 33: So, at least, I conceive, by what appears afterwards; and I may here add, once for all, that I have supplied the similar requisite intimations at each successive step in Purgatory, the poet seemingly having forgotten to do so. It is necessary to what he implied in the outset. The whole poem, it is to be remembered, is thought to have wanted his final revision.]

[Footnote 34: What an instance to put among those of haste to do good! But the fame and accomplishments of Cæsar, and his being at the head of our Ghibelline's beloved emperors, fairly overwhelmed Dante's boasted impartiality.]

[Footnote 35: A masterly allegory of Worldly Pleasure. But the close of it in the original has an intensity of the revolting, which outrages the last recesses of feeling, and disgusts us with the denouncer.]

[Footnote 36: The fierce Hugh Capet, soliloquising about the Virgin in the tones of a lady in child-bed, is rather too ludicrous an association of ideas. It was for calling this prince the son of a butcher, that Francis the First prohibited the admission of Dante's poem into his dominions. Mr. Cary thinks the king might have been mistaken in his interpretation of the passage, and that "butcher" may be simply a metaphorical term for the blood-thirstiness of Capet's father. But when we find the man called, not the butcher, or that butcher, or butcher in reference to his species, but in plain local parlance "a butcher of Paris" (un beccaio di Parigi), and when this designation is followed up by the allusion to the extinction of the previous dynasty, the ordinary construction of the words appears indisputable. Dante seems to have had no ground for what his aristocratical pride doubtless considered a hard blow, and what King Francis, indeed, condescended to feel as such. He met with the notion somewhere, and chose to believe it, in order to vex the French and their princes. The spirit of the taunt contradicts his own theories elsewhere; for he has repeatedly said, that the only true nobility is in the mind. But his writings (poetical truth excepted) are a heap of contradictions.]

[Footnote 37: Mr. Cary thought he had seen an old romance in which there is a combat of this kind between Jesus and his betrayer. I have an impression to the same effect.]

[Footnote 38:

"O Signor mio, quando sarò io lieto
A veder la vendetta the nascosa
Fa dolce l'ira tua nel tuo segreto!"

The spirit of the blasphemous witticism attributed to another Italian, viz. that the reason why God prohibited revenge to mankind was its being "too delicate a morsel for any but himself," is here gravely anticipated as a positive compliment to God by the fierce poet of the thirteenth century, who has been held up as a great Christian divine! God hugs revenge to his bosom with delight! The Supreme Being confounded with a poor grinning Florentine!]

[Footnote 39: A ludicrous anti-climax this to modern ears! The allusion is to the Pygmalion who was Dido's brother, and who murdered her husband, the priest Sichæus, for his riches. The term "parricide" is here applied in its secondary sense of—the murderer of any one to whom we owe reverence.]

[Footnote 40: Heliodorus was a plunderer of the Temple, thus supernaturally punished. The subject has been nobly treated by Raphael.]

[Footnote 41: A grand and beautiful fiction.]

[Footnote 42: Readers need hardly be told that there is no foundation for this fancy, except in the invention of the churchmen. Dante, in another passage, not necessary to give, confounds the poet Statius who was from Naples, with a rhetorician of the same name from Thoulouse.]

[Footnote 43:

"Parèn l'occhiaje anella senza gemme."

This beautiful and affecting image is followed in the original by one of the most fantastical conceits of the time. The poet says, that the physiognomist who "reads the word OMO (homo, man), written in the face of the human being, might easily have seen the letter m in theirs."

"Chi nel viso de gli uomini legge o m o,
Bene avria quivi conosciuto l'emme."

The meaning is, that the perpendicular lines of the nose and temples form the letter M, and the eyes the two O's. The enthusiast for Roman domination must have been delighted to find that Nature wrote in Latin!]

[Footnote 44:

"Se le svergognate fosser certe
Di quel che l' ciel veloce loro ammanna,
Gia per urlare avrian le bocche aperte."

This will remind the reader of the style of that gentle Christian, John Knox, who, instead of offering his own "cheek to the smiters," delighted to smite the cheeks of women. Fury was his mode of preaching meekness, and threats of everlasting howling his reproof of a tune on Sundays. But, it will be said, he looked to consequences. Yes; and produced the worst himself, both spiritual and temporal. Let the whisky-shops answer him. However, he helped to save Scotland from Purgatory: so we must take good and bad together, and hope the best in the end.

Forese, like many of Dante's preachers, seems to have been one of those self-ignorant or self-exasperated denouncers, who "Compound for sins they are inclined to, By damning those they have no mind to." He was a glutton, who could not bear to see ladies too little clothed. The defacing of "God's image" in his own person he considered nothing.]

[Footnote 45: The passage respecting his past life is unequivocal testimony to the fact, confidently disputed by some, of Dante's having availed himself of the license of the time; though, in justice to such candour, we are bound not to think worse of it than can be helped. The words in the original are

"Se ti riduci a mente
Qual fosti meco, e quale io teco fui,
Ancor fia grave il memorar presente."

Literally: "If thou recallest to mind what (sort of person) thou wast with me, and what I was with thee, the recollection may oppress thee still."

His having been taken out of that kind of life by Virgil (construed in the literal sense, in which, among other senses, he has directed us to construe him), may imply, either that the delight of reading Virgil first made him think of living in a manner more becoming a man of intellect, or (possibly) that the Latin poet's description of Æneas's descent into hell turned his thoughts to religious penitence. Be this as it may, his life, though surely it could at no time have been of any very licentious kind, never, if we are to believe Boccaccio, became spotless.]

[Footnote 46: The mention of Gentucca might be thought a compliment to the lady, if Dante had not made Beatrice afterwards treat his regard for any one else but herself with so much contempt. (See page 216 of the present volume.) Under that circumstance, it is hardly acting like a gentleman to speak of her at all; unless, indeed, he thought her a person who would be pleased with the notoriety arising even from the record of a fugitive regard; and in that case the good taste of the record would still remain doubtful. The probability seems to be, that Dante was resolved, at all events, to take this opportunity of bearding some rumour.]

[Footnote 47: A celebrated and charming passage:

"Io mi son un, che quando
Amore spira, noto; e a quel modo
Che detta dentro, vo significando."

I am one that notes
When Love inspires; and what he speaks I tell
In his own way, embodying but his thoughts.

[Footnote 48: Exquisite truth of painting! and a very elegant compliment to the handsome nature of Buonaggiunta. Jacopo da Lentino, called the Notary, and Fra Guittone of Arezzo, were celebrated verse-writers of the day. The latter, in a sonnet given by Mr. Cary in the notes to his translation, says he shall be delighted to hear the trumpet, at the last day, dividing mankind into the happy and the tormented (sufferers under crudel martire), because an inscription will then be seen on his forehead, shewing that he had been a slave to love! An odd way for a poet to shew his feelings, and a friar his religion!]

[Footnote 49: Judges vii. 6.]

[Footnote 50: Summæ Deus clementiæ. The ancient beginning of a hymn in the Roman Catholic church; now altered, say the commentators, to "Summæ parens clementiæ.">[

[Footnote 51: Virum non cognosco. "Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?"—Luke i. 34.

The placing of Mary's interview with the angel, and Ovid's story of Calisto, upon apparently the same identical footing of authority, by spirits in all the sincerity of agonised penitence, is very remarkable. A dissertation, by some competent antiquary, on the curious question suggested by these anomalies, would be a welcome novelty in the world of letters.]

[Footnote 52: An allegory of the Active and Contemplative Life;—not, I think, a happy one, though beautifully painted. It presents, apart from its terminating comment no necessary intellectual suggestion; is rendered, by the, comment itself, hardly consistent with Leah's express love of ornament; and, if it were not for the last sentence, might be taken for a picture of two different forms of Vanity.]

[Footnote 53:

"Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie
Per la pineta in sul lito di Chiassi,
Quand' Eolo scirocco fuor discioglie."

Even as from branch to branch
Along the piny forests on the shore
Of Chiassi, rolls the gathering melody,
When Eolus hath from his cavern loosed
The dripping south."—Cary.

"This is the wood," says Mr. Cary, "where the scene of Boccaccio's sublimest story (taken entirely from Elinaud, as I learn in the notes to the Decameron, ediz. Giunti, 1573, p. 62) is laid. See Dec., G. 5, N. 8, and Dryden's Theodore and Honoria. Our poet perhaps wandered in it during his abode with Guido Novello da Polenta."—Translation of Dante, ut sup. p. 121.]

[Footnote 54: Lethe, Forgetfulness; Eunoe, Well-mindedness.]

[Footnote 55:

"Senza alcuno scotto
Di pentimento."

Literally, scot-free.—"Scotto," scot;—"payment for dinner or supper in a tavern" (says Rubbi, the Petrarchal rather than Dantesque editor of the Parnaso Italiano, and a very summary gentleman); "here used figuratively, though it is not a word fit to be employed on serious and grand occasions" (in cose gravi ed illustri). See his "Dante" in that collection, vol. ii. p. 297.]

[Footnote 56: The allusion to the childish girl (pargoletta) or any other fleeting vanity,

"O altra vanità con sì breve use,"

is not handsome. It was not the fault of the childish girls that he liked them; and he should not have taunted them, whatever else they might have been. What answer could they make to the great poet?

Nor does Beatrice make a good figure throughout this scene, whether as a woman or an allegory. If she is Theology, or Heavenly Grace, &c. the sternness of the allegory should not have been put into female shape; and when she is to be taken in her literal sense (as the poet also tells us she is), her treatment of the poor submissive lover, with leave of Signor Rubbi, is no better than snubbing;—to say nothing of the vanity with which she pays compliments to her own beauty.

I must, furthermore, beg leave to differ with the poet's thinking it an exalted symptom on his part to hate every thing he had loved before, out of supposed compliment the transcendental object of his affections and his own awakened merits. All the heights of love and wisdom terminate in charity; and charity, by very reason of its knowing the poorness of so many things, hates nothing. Besides, it is any thing but handsome or high-minded to turn round upon objects whom we have helped to lower with our own gratified passions, and pretend a right to scorn them.]

[Footnote 57:

"Tu asperges me, et mundabor," &c. "Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."—Psalm li. 7.]

[Footnote 58: Beatrice had been dead ten years.]

III.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. Argument.

The Paradise or Heaven of Dante, in whose time the received system of astronomy was the Ptolemaic, consists of the Seven successive Planets according to that system, or the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; of the Eighth Sphere beyond these, or that of the Fixed Stars; of the Primum Mobile, or First Mover of them all round the moveless Earth; and of the Empyrean, or Region of Pure Light, in which is the Beatific Vision. Each of these ascending spheres is occupied by its proportionate degree of Faith and Virtue; and Dante visits each under the guidance of Beatrice, receiving many lessons, as he goes, on theological and other subjects (here left out), and being finally admitted, after the sight of Christ and the Virgin, to a glimpse of the Great First Cause.

THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN.

It was evening now on earth, and morning on the top of the hill in Purgatory, when Beatrice having fixed her eyes upon the sun, Dante fixed his eyes upon hers, and suddenly found himself in Heaven.

He had been transported by the attraction of love, and Beatrice was by his side.

The poet beheld from where he stood the blaze of the empyrean, and heard the music of the spheres; yet he was only in the first or lowest Heaven, the circle of the orb of the moon.

This orb, with his new guide, he proceeded to enter. It had seemed, outside, as solid, though as lucid, as diamond; yet they entered it, as sunbeams are admitted into water without dividing the substance. It now appeared, as it enclosed them, like a pearl, through the essence of which they saw but dimly; and they beheld many faces eagerly looking at them, as if about to speak, but not more distinct from the surrounding whiteness than pearls themselves are from the forehead they adorn.[1] Dante thought them only reflected faces, and turned round to see to whom they belonged, when his smiling companion set him right; and he entered into discourse with the spirit that seemed the most anxious to accost him. It was Piccarda, the sister of his friend Forese Donati, whom he had met in the sixth region of Purgatory. He did not know her, by reason of her wonderful increase in beauty. She and her associates were such as had been Vowed to a Life of Chastity and Religion, but had been Compelled by Others to Break their Vows. This had been done, in Piccarda's instance, by her brother Corso.[2] On

Dante's asking if they did not long for a higher state of bliss, she and her sister-spirits gently smiled; and then answered, with faces as happy as first love,[3] that they willed only what it pleased God to give them, and therefore were truly blest. The poet found by this answer, that every place in Heaven was Paradise, though the bliss might be of different degrees. Piccarda then shewed him the spirit at her side, lustrous with all the glory of the region, Costanza, daughter of the king of Sicily, who had been forced out of the cloister to become the wife of the Emperor Henry. Having given him this information, she began singing Ave Maria; and, while singing, disappeared with the rest, as substances disappear in water.[4]

A loving will transported the two companions, as before, to the next circle of Heaven, where they found themselves in the planet Mercury, the residence of those who had acted rather out of Desire of Fame than Love of God. The spirits here, as in the former Heaven, crowded towards them, as fish in a clear pond crowd to the hand that offers them food. Their eyes sparkled with celestial joy; and the more they thought of their joy, the brighter they grew; till one of them who addressed the poet became indistinguishable for excess of splendour. It was the soul of the Emperor Justinian. Justinian told him the whole story of the Roman empire up to his time; and then gave an account of one of his associates in bliss, Romèo, who had been minister to Raymond Beranger, Count of Provence. Four daughters had been born to Raymond Beranger, and every one became a queen; and all this had been brought about by Romèo, a poor stranger from another country. The courtiers, envying Romèo, incited Raymond to demand of him an account of his stewardship, though he had brought his master's treasury twelve-fold for every ten it disbursed. Romeo quitted the court, poor and old; "and if the world," said Justinian, "could know the heart such a man must have had, begging his bread as he went, crust by crust—praise him as it does, it would praise him a great deal more."[5]

"Hosanna, Holy God of Sabaoth,
Superillumining with light of light
The happy fires of these thy Malahoth!"[6]

Thus began singing the soul of the Emperor Justinian; and then, turning as he sang, vanished with those about him, like sparks of fire.

Dante now found himself, before he was aware, in the third Heaven, or planet Venus, the abode of the Amorous.[7] He only knew it by the increased loveliness in the face of his companion.

The spirits in this orb, who came and went in the light of it like sparks in fire, or like voices chanting in harmony with voice, were spun round in circles of delight, each with more or less swiftness, according to its share of the beatific vision. Several of them came sweeping out of their dance towards the poet who had sung of Love, among whom was his patron, Charles Martel, king of Hungary, who shewed him the reason why diversities of natures must occur in families; and Cunizza, sister of the tyrant Ezzelino, who was overcome by this her star when on earth; and Folco the Troubadour, whose place was next Cunizza in Heaven; and Rahab the harlot, who favoured the entrance of the Jews into the Holy Land, and whose place was next Folco.[8] Cunizza said that she did not at all regret a lot which carried her no higher, whatever the vulgar might think of such an opinion. She spoke of the glories of the jewel who was close to her, Folco—contrasted his zeal with the inertness of her contemptible countrymen—and foretold the bloodshed that awaited the latter from wars and treacheries. The Troubadour, meanwhile, glowed in his aspect like a ruby stricken with the sun; for in heaven joy is expressed by effulgence, as on earth by laughter. He confessed the lawless fires of his youth, as great (he said) as those of Dido or Hercules; but added, that he had no recollection of them, except a joyous one, not for the fault (which does not come to mind in heaven), but for the good which heaven brings out of it. Folco concluded with explaining how Rahab had come into the third Heaven, and with denouncing the indifference of popes and cardinals (those adulterers of the Church) to every thing but accursed money-getting.[9]

In an instant, before he could think about it, Dante was in the fourth Heaven, the sun, the abode of Blessed Doctors of the Church. A band of them came encircling him and his guide, as a halo encircles the moon, singing a song, the beauty of which, like jewels too rich to be exported, was not conveyable by expression to mortal fancy. The spirits composing the band were those of St. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Gratian the Benedictine, Pietro Lombardo, Solomon, Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, Paulus Orosius, Boetius, Isidore, the Venerable Bede, Richard of St. Victor, and Sigebert of Gemblours. St. Thomas was the namer of them to Dante. Their song had paused that he might speak; but when he had done speaking, they began resuming it, one by one, and circling as they moved, like the wheels of church-clocks that sound one after another with a sweet tinkling, when they summon the hearts of the devout to morning prayer.[10]

Again they stopped, and again St. Thomas addressed the poet. He was of the order of St. Dominic; but with generous grace he held up the founder of the Franciscans, with his vow of poverty, as the example of what a pope should be, and reproved the errors of no order but his own. On the other hand, a new circle of doctors of the Church making their appearance, and enclosing the first as rainbow encloses rainbow, rolling round with it in the unison of a two-fold joy, a voice from the new circle attracted the poet's ear, as the pole attracts the needle, and Saint Buonaventura, a Franciscan, opened upon the praises of St. Dominic, the loving minion of Christianity, the holy wrestler,—benign to his friends and cruel to his enemies;[11]—and so confined his reproofs to his own Franciscan order. He then, as St. Thomas had done with the doctors in the inner circle, named those who constituted the outer: to wit, Illuminato, and Agostino, and Hugues of St. Victor, and Petrus Comestor, and Pope John the Twenty-first, Nathan the Prophet, Chrysostom, Anselmo of Canterbury, Donatus who deigned to teach grammar, Raban of Mentz, and Joachim of Calabria. The two circles then varied their movement by wheeling round one another in counter directions; and after they had chanted, not of Bacchus or Apollo, but of Three Persons in One, St. Thomas, who knew Dante's thoughts by intuition, again addressed him, discoursing of mysteries human and divine, exhorting him to be slow in giving assent or denial to propositions without examination, and bidding him warn people in general how they presumed to anticipate the divine judgment as to who should be saved and who not.[12] The spirit of Solomon then related how souls could resume their bodies glorified; and the two circles uttering a rapturous amen, glowed with such intolerable brightness, that the eyes of Beatrice only were able to sustain it. Dante gazed on her with a delight ineffable, and suddenly found himself in the fifth Heaven.

It was the planet Mars, the receptacle of those who had Died Fighting for the Cross. In the middle of its ruddy light stood a cross itself, of enormous dimensions, made of light still greater, and exhibiting, first, in the body of it, the Crucified Presence, glittering all over with indescribable flashes like lightning; and secondly, in addition to and across the Presence, innumerable sparkles of the intensest mixture of white and red, darting to and fro through the whole extent of the crucifix. The movement was like that of motes in a sunbeam. And as a sweet dinning arises from the multitudinous touching of harps and viols, before the ear distinguishes the notes, there issued in like manner from the whole glittering ferment a harmony indistinct but exquisite, which entranced the poet beyond all he had ever felt. He heard even the words, "Arise and conquer," as one who hears and yet hears not.

On a sudden, with a glide like a falling star, there ran down from the right horn of the Cross to the foot of it, one of the lights of this cluster of splendours, distinguishing itself, as it went, like flame in alabaster.

"O flesh of my flesh!" it exclaimed to Dante; "O superabounding Divine Grace! when was the door of Paradise ever twice opened, as it Shall have been to thee?"[13] Dante, in astonishment, turned to Beatrice, and saw such a rapture of delight in her eyes, that he seemed, at that instant, as if his own had touched the depth of his acceptance and of his heaven.[14]

The light resumed its speech, but in words too profound in their meaning for Dante to comprehend. They seemed to be returning thanks to God. This rapturous absorption being ended, the speaker expressed in more human terms his gratitude to Beatrice; and then, after inciting Dante to ask his name, declared himself thus:

"O branch of mine, whom I have long desired to behold, I am the root of thy stock; of him thy great-grandsire, who first brought from his mother the family-name into thy house, and whom thou sawest expiating his sin of pride on the first circle of the mountain. Well it befitteth thee to shorten his long suffering with thy good works. Florence,[15] while yet she was confined within the ancient boundary which still contains the bell that summons her to prayer, abided in peace, for she was chaste and sober. She had no trinkets of chains then, no head-tires, no gaudy sandals, no girdles more worth looking at than the wearers. Fathers were not then afraid of having daughters, for fear they should want dowries too great, and husbands before their time. Families were in no haste to separate; nor had chamberers arisen to shew what enormities they dared to practise. The heights of Rome had not been surpassed by your tower of Uccellatoio, whose fall shall be in proportion to its aspiring. I saw Bellincion Berti walking the streets in a leathern girdle fastened with bone; and his wife come from her looking-glass without a painted face. I saw the Nerlis and the Vecchios contented with the simplest doublets, and their good dames hard at work at their spindles. O happy they! They were sure of burial in their native earth, and none were left desolate by husbands that loved France better than Italy. One kept awake to tend her child in its cradle, lulling it with the household words that had fondled her own infancy. Another, as she sat in the midst of her family, drawing the flax from the distaff, told them stories of Troy, and Fiesole, and Rome. It would have been as great a wonder, then, to see such a woman as Cianghella, or such a man as Lapo Salterello, as it would now be to meet with a Cincinnatus or a Cornelia.[16]

"It was at that peaceful, at that beautiful time," continued the poet's ancestor, "when we all lived in such good faith and fellowship, and in so sweet a place, that the blessed Virgin vouchsafed the first sight of me to the cries of my mother; and there, in your old Baptistery, I became, at once, Christian and Cacciaguida. My brothers were called Moronto and Eliseo. It was my wife that brought thee, from Valdipado, thy family name of Alighieri. I then followed the Emperor Conrad, and he made me a knight for my good service, and I went with him to fight against the wicked Saracen law, whose people usurp the fold that remains lost through the fault of the shepherd. There, by that foul crew, was I delivered from the snares and pollutions of the world; and so, from the martyrdom, came to this peace."

Cacciaguida was silent. But his descendant praying to be told more of his family and of the old state of Florence, the beatified soldier resumed. He would not, however, speak of his own predecessors. He said it would be more becoming to say nothing as to who they were, or the place they came from. All he disclosed was, that his father and mother lived near the gate San Piero.[17] With regard to Florence, he continued, the number of the inhabitants fit to carry arms was at that time not a fifth of its present amount; but then the blood of the whole city was pure. It had not been mixed up with that of Campi, and Certaldo, and Figghine. It ran clear in the veins of the humblest mechanic.

"Oh, how much better would it have been," cried the soul of the old Florentine, "had my countrymen still kept it as it was, and not brought upon themselves the stench of the peasant knave out of Aguglione, and that other from Signa, with his eye to a bribe! Had Rome done its duty to the emperor, and so prevented the factions that have ruined us, Simifonte would have kept its beggarly upstart to itself; the Conti would have stuck to their parish of Acone, and perhaps the Buondelmonti to Valdigrieve. Crude mixtures do as much harm to the body politic as to the natural body; and size is not strength. The blind bull falls with a speedier plunge than the blind lamb. One sword often slashes round about it better than five. Cities themselves perish. See what has become of Luni and of Urbisaglia; and what will soon become of Sinigaglia too, and of Chiusi! And if cities perish, what is to be expected of families? In my time the Ughi, the Catellini, the Filippi, were great names. So were the Alberichi, the Ormanni, and twenty others. The golden sword of knighthood was then to be seen in the house of Galigaio. The Column, Verrey, was then a great thing in the herald's eye. The Galli, the Sacchetti, were great; so was the old trunk of the Calfucci; so was that of the peculators who now blush to hear of a measure of wheat; and the Sizii and the Arrigucci were drawn in pomp to their civic chairs. Oh, how mighty I saw them then, and how low has their pride brought them! Florence in those days deserved her name. She flourished indeed; and the balls of gold were ever at the top of the flower.[18] And now the descendants of these men sit in priestly stalls and grow fat. The over-weening Adimari, who are such dragons when their foes run, and such lambs when they turn, were then of note so little, that Albertino Donato was angry with Bellincion, his father-in-law, for making him brother to one of their females. On the other hand, thy foes, the Amidei, the origin of all thy tears through the just anger which has slain the happiness of thy life, were honoured in those days; and the honour was par taken by their friends. O Buondelmonte! why didst thou break thy troth to thy first love, and become wedded to another? Many who are now miserable would have been happy, had God given thee to the river Ema, when it rose against thy first coming to Florence. But the Arno had swept our Palladium from its bridge, and Florence was to be the victim on its altar."[19]

Cacciaguida was again silent; but his descendant begged him to speak yet a little more. He had heard, as he came through the nether regions, alarming intimations of the ill fortune that awaited him, and he was anxious to know, from so high and certain an authority, what it would really be.

Cacciaguida said, "As Hippolytus was forced to depart from Athens by the wiles of his cruel step-dame, so must even thou depart out of Florence. Such is the wish, such this very moment the plot, and soon will it be the deed, of those, the business of whose lives is to make a traffic of Christ with Rome. Thou shalt quit every thing that is dearest to thee in the world. That is the first arrow shot from the bow of exile. Thou shalt experience how salt is the taste of bread eaten at the expense of others; how hard is the going up and down others' stairs. But what shall most bow thee down, is the worthless and disgusting company with whom thy lot must be partaken; for they shall all turn against thee, the whole mad, heartless, and ungrateful set. Nevertheless, it shall not be long first, before themselves, and not thou, shall have cause to hang down their heads for shame. The brutishness of all they do, will shew how well it became thee to be of no party, but the party of thyself.[20]

"Thy first refuge thou shalt owe to the courtesy of the great Lombard, who bears the Ladder charged with the Holy Bird.[21] So benignly shall he regard thee, that in the matter of asking and receiving, the customary order of things shall be reversed between you two, and the gift anticipate the request. With him thou shalt behold the mortal, born under so strong an influence of this our star, that the nations shall take note of him. They are not aware of him yet, by reason of his tender age; but ere the Gascon practise on the great Henry, sparkles of his worth shall break forth in his contempt of money and of ease; and when his munificence appears in all its lustre, his very enemies shall not be able to hold their tongues for admiration.[22] Look thou to this second benefactor also; for many a change of the lots of people shall he make, both rich and poor; and do thou bear in mind, but repeat not, what further I shall now tell thee of thy life." Here the spirit, says the poet, foretold things which afterwards appeared incredible to their very beholders;—and then added: "Such, my son, is the heart and mystery of the things thou hast desired to learn. The snares will shortly gather about thee; but wish not to change places with the contrivers; for thy days will outlast those of their retribution."

Again was the spirit silent; and yet again once more did his descendant question him, anxious to have the advice of one that saw so far, and that spoke the truth so purely, and loved him so well.

"Too plainly, my father," said Dante, "do I see the time coming, when a blow is to be struck me, heaviest ever to the man that is not true to himself. For which reason it is fit that I so far arm myself beforehand, that in losing the spot dearest to me on earth, I do not let my verses deprive me of every other refuge. Now I have been down below through the region whose grief is without end; and I have scaled the mountain from the top of which I was lifted by my lady's eyes; and I have come thus far through heaven, from luminary to luminary; and in the course of this my pilgrimage I have heard things which, if I tell again, may bitterly disrelish with many. Yet, on the other hand, if I prove but a timid friend to truth, I fear I shall not survive with the generations by whom the present times will be called times of old."

The light that enclosed the treasure which its descendant had found in heaven, first flashed at this speech like a golden mirror against the sun, and then it replied thus:

"Let the consciences blush at thy words that have reason to blush. Do thou, far from shadow of misrepresentation, make manifest all which thou hast seen, and let the sore places be galled that deserve it. Thy bitter truths shall carry with them vital nourishment—thy voice, as the wind does, shall smite loudest the loftiest summits; and no little shall that redound to thy praise. It is for this reason that, in all thy journey, thou hast been shewn none but spirits of note, since little heed would have been taken of such as excite doubt by their obscurity."

The spirit of Cacciaguida now relapsed into the silent joy of its reflections, and the poet was standing absorbed in the mingled feelings of his own, when Beatrice said to him, "Change the current of thy thoughts. Consider how near I am in heaven to one that repayeth every wrong."

Dante turned at the sound of this comfort, and felt no longer any other wish than to look upon her eyes; but she said, with a smile, "Turn thee round again, and attend. I am not thy only Paradise." And Dante again turned, and saw his ancestor prepared to say more.

Cacciaguida bade him look again on the Cross, and he should see various spirits, as he named them, flash over it like lightning; and they did so. That of Joshua, which was first mentioned, darted along the Cross in a stream. The light of Judas Maccabeus went spinning, as if joy had scourged it.[23] Charlemagne and Orlando swept away together, pursued by the poet's eyes. Guglielmo[24] followed, and Rinaldo, and Godfrey of Bouillon, and Robert Guiscard of Naples; and the light of Cacciaguida himself darted back to its place, and, uttering another sort of voice, began shewing how sweet a singer he too was amidst the glittering choir.

Dante turned to share the joy with Beatrice, and, by the lovely paling of her cheek, like a maiden's when it delivers itself of the burden of a blush,[25] knew that he was in another and whiter star. It was the planet Jupiter, the abode of blessed Administrators of Justice.

Here he beheld troops of dazzling essences, warbling as they flew, and shaping their flights hither and thither, like birds when they rise from the banks of rivers, and rejoice with one another in new-found pasture. But the figures into which the flights were shaped were of a more special sort, being mystical compositions of letters of the alphabet, now a D, now an I, now an L, and so on, till the poet observed that they completed the whole text of Scripture, which says, Diligite justitiam, qui judicatis terram—(Love righteousness, ye that be judges of the earth). The last letter, M, they did not decompose like the rest, but kept it entire for a while, and glowed so deeply within it, that the silvery orb thereabout seemed burning with gold. Other lights, with a song of rapture, then descended like a crown of lilies, on the top, of the letter; and then, from the body of it, rose thousands of sparks, as from a shaken firebrand, and, gradually expanding into the form of an eagle, the lights which had descended like lilies distributed themselves over the whole bird, encrusting it with rubies flashing in the sun.

But what, says the poet, was never yet heard of, written, or imagined,—the beak of the eagle spoke! It uttered many minds in one voice, just as one heat is given out by many embers; and proclaimed itself to have been thus exalted, because it united justice and mercy while on earth.

Dante addressed this splendid phenomenon, and prayed it to ease his mind of the perplexities of its worldly reason respecting the Divine nature and government, and the exclusion from heaven of goodness itself, unless within the Christian pale.

The celestial bird, rousing itself into motion with delight, like a falcon in the conscious energy of its will and beauty, when, upon being set free from its hood, it glances above it into the air, and claps its self-congratulating wings, answered nevertheless somewhat disdainfully, that it was impossible for man, in his mortal state, to comprehend such things; and that the astonishment he feels at them, though doubtless it would be excusable under other circumstances, must rest satisfied with the affirmations of Scripture.

The bird then bent over its questioner, as a stork does over the nestling newly fed when it looks up at her, and then wheeling round, and renewing its warble, concluded it with saying, "As my notes are to thee that understandest them not, so are the judgments of the Eternal to thine earthly brethren. None ever yet ascended into these heavenly regions that did not believe in Christ, either after he was crucified or before it. Yet many, who call Christ! Christ! shall at the last day be found less near to him than such as knew him not. What shall the kings of Islam say to your Christian kings, when they see the book of judgment opened, and hear all that is set down in it to their dishonour? In that book shall be read the desolation which Albert will inflict on Bohemia:[26]—in that book, the woes inflicted on Paris by that adulterator of his kingdom's money, who shall die by the hog's teeth:—in that book, the ambition which makes such mad fools of the Scotch and English kings, that they cannot keep within their bounds:—in that book, the luxury of the Spaniard, and the effeminate life of the Bohemian, who neither knows nor cares for any thing worthy:—in that book, the lame wretch of Jerusalem, whose value will be expressed by a unit, and his worthlessness by a million:—in that book, the avarice and cowardice of the warder of the Isle of Fire, in which old Anchises died; and that the record may answer the better to his abundant littleness, the writing shall be in short-hand; and his uncle's and his brother's filthy doings shall be read in that book—they who have made such rottenness of a good old house and two diadems; and there also shall the Portuguese and the Norwegian be known for what they are, and the coiner of Dalmatia, who beheld with such covetous eyes the Venetian ducat. O blessed Hungary, if thou wouldst resolve to endure no longer!—O blessed Navarre, if thou wouldst but keep out the Frenchman with thy mountain walls! May the cries and groans of Nicosia and Famagosta be an earnest of those happier days, proclaiming as they do the vile habits of the beast, who keeps so close in the path of the herd his brethren."

The blessed bird for a moment was silent; but as, at the going down of the sun, the heavens are darkened, and then break forth into innumerable stars which the sun lights up,[27] so the splendours within the figure of the bird suddenly became more splendid, and broke forth into songs too beautiful for mortal to remember.

O dulcet love, that dost shew thee forth in smiles, how ardent was thy manifestation in the lustrous sparkles which arose out of the mere thoughts of those pious hearts!

After the gems in that glittering figure had ceased chiming their angelic songs, the poet seemed to hear the murmur of a river which comes falling from rock to rock, and chews, by the fulness of its tone, the abundance of its mountain spring; and as the sound of the guitar is modulated on the neck of it, and the breath of the pipe is accordant to the spiracle from which it issues, so the murmuring within the eagle suddenly took voice, and, rising through the neck, again issued forth in words. The bird now bade the poet fix his attention on its eye; because, of all the fires that composed its figure, those that sparkled in the eye were the noblest. The spirit (it said) which Dante beheld in the pupil was that of the royal singer who danced before the ark, now enjoying the reward of his superiority to vulgar discernment. Of the five spirits that composed the eyebrow, the one nearest the beak was Trajan, now experienced above all others in the knowledge of what it costs not to follow Christ, by reason of his having been in hell before he was translated to heaven. Next to Trajan was Hezekiah, whose penitence delayed for him the hour of his death: next Hezekiah, Constantine, though, in letting the pope become a prince instead of a pastor, he had unwittingly brought destruction on the world: next Constantine, William the Good of Sicily, whose death is not more lamented than the lives of those who contest his crown and lastly, next William, Riphaeus the Trojan. "What erring mortal," cried the bird, "would believe it possible to find Riphæus the Trojan among the blest?—but so it is; and he now knows more respecting the divine grace than mortals do, though even he discerns it not to the depth."[28]

The bird again relapsing into silence, appeared to repose on the happiness of its thoughts, like the lark which, after quivering and expatiating through all its airy warble, becomes mute and content, having satisfied its soul to the last drop of its sweetness.[29]

But again Dante could not help speaking, being astonished to find Pagans in Heaven; and once more the celestial figure indulged his curiosity. It told him that Trajan had been delivered from hell, for his love of justice, by the prayers of St. Gregory; and that Riphaeus, for the same reason, had been gifted with a prophetic knowledge of the Redemption; and then it ended with a rapture on the hidden mysteries of Predestination, and on the joy of ignorance itself when submitting to the divine will. The two blessed spirits, meanwhile, whom the bird mentioned, like the fingers of sweet lutenist to sweet singer, when they quiver to his warble as it goes, manifested the delight they experienced by movements of accord simultaneous as the twinkling of two eyes.[30]

Dante turned to receive his own final delight from the eyes of Beatrice, and he found it, though the customary smile on her face was no longer there. She told him that her beauty increased with such intensity at every fresh ascent among the stars, that he would no longer have been able to bear the smile; and they were now in the seventh Heaven, or the planet Saturn, the retreat of those who had passed their lives in Holy Contemplation.

In this crystal sphere, called after the name of the monarch who reigned over the Age of Innocence, Dante looked up, and beheld a ladder, the hue of which was like gold when the sun glisters it, and the height so great that its top was out of sight; and down the steps of this ladder he saw coming such multitudes of shining spirits, that it seemed as if all the lights of heaven must have been there poured forth; but not a sound was in the whole splendour. It was spared to the poet for the same reason that he missed the smile of Beatrice. When they came to a certain step in the ladder, some of the spirits flew off it in circles or other careers, like rooks when they issue from their trees in the morning to dry their feathers in the sun, part of them going away without returning, others returning to the point they left, and others contenting themselves with flying round about it. One of them came so near Dante and Beatrice, and brightened with such ardour, that the poet saw it was done in affection towards them, and begged the loving spirit to tell them who it was.

"Between the two coasts of Italy," said the spirit, "and not far from thine own country, the stony mountains ascend into a ridge so lofty that the thunder rolls beneath it. Catria is its name. Beneath it is a consecrated cell; and in that cell I was called Pietro Damiano.[31] I so devoted myself to the service of God, that with no other sustenance than the juice of the olive, I forgot both heat and cold, happy in heavenly meditation. That cloister made abundant returns in its season to these granaries of the Lord; but so idle has it become now, that it is fit the world should know its barrenness. The days of my mortal life were drawing to a close, when I was besought and drawn into wearing the hat which descends every day from bad head to worse.[32] St. Peter and St. Paul came lean and barefoot, getting their bread where they could; but pastors now-a-days must be lifted from the ground, and have ushers going before them, and train-bearers behind them, and ride upon palfreys covered with their spreading mantles, so that two beasts go under one skin.[33] O Lord, how long!"

At these words Dante saw more splendours come pouring down the ladder, and wheel round and round, and become at every wheel more beautiful. The whole dazzling body then gathered round the indignant speaker, and shouted something in a voice so tremendous, that the poet could liken it to nothing on earth. The thunder was so overwhelming, that he did not even hear what they said.[34]

Pallid and stunned, he turned in affright to Beatrice, who comforted him as a mother comforts a child that wants breath to speak. The shout was prophetic of the vengeance about to overtake the Church. Beatrice then directed hisattention to a multitude of small orbs, which increased one another's beauty by interchanging their splendours. They enclosed the spirits of those who most combined meditation with love. One of them was Saint Benedict; and others Macarius and Romoaldo.[35] The light of St. Benedict issued forth from among its companions to address the poet; and after explaining how its occupant was unable farther to disclose himself, inveighed against the degeneracy of the religious orders. It then rejoined its fellows, and the whole company clustering into one meteor, swept aloft like a whirlwind. Beatrice beckoned the poet to ascend after them. He did so, gifted with the usual virtue by her eyes; and found himself in the twin light of the Gemini, the constellation that presided over his birth. He was now in the region of the fixed stars.

"Thou art now," said his guide, "so near the summit of thy prayers, that it behoves thee to take a last look at things below thee, and see how little they should account in thine eyes." Dante turned his eyes downwards through all the seven spheres, and saw the earth so diminutive, that he smiled at its miserable appearance. Wisest, thought he, is the man that esteems it least; and truly worthy he that sets his thoughts on the world to come. He now saw the moon without those spots in it which made him formerly attribute the variation to dense and rare. He sustained the brightness of the face of the sun, and discerned all the signs and motions and relative distances of the planets. Finally, he saw, as he rolled round with the sphere in which he stood, and by virtue of his gifted sight, the petty arena, from hill to harbour, which filled his countrymen with such ferocious ambition; and then he turned his eyes to the sweet eyes beside him.[36]

Beatrice stood wrapt in attention, looking earnestly towards the south, as if she expected some appearance. She resembled the bird that sits among the dewy leaves in the darkness of night, yearning for the coming of the morning, that she may again behold her young, and have light by which to seek the food, that renders her fatigue for them a joy. So stood Beatrice, looking; which caused Dante to watch in the same direction, with the feelings of one that is already possessed of some new delight by the assuredness of his expectation.[37]

The quarter on which they were gazing soon became brighter and brighter, and Beatrice exclaimed, "Behold the armies of the triumph of Christ!" Her face appeared all fire, and her eyes so full of love, that the poet could find no words to express them.

As the moon, when the depths of heaven are serene with her fulness, looks abroad smiling among her eternal handmaids the stars, that paint every gulf of the great hollow with beauty;[38] so brightest, above myriads of splendours around it, appeared a sun which gave radiance to them all, even as our earthly sun gives light to the constellations.

"O Beatrice!" exclaimed Dante, overpowered, "sweet and beloved guide!"

"Overwhelming," said Beatrice, "is the virtue with which nothing can compare. What thou hast seen is the Wisdom and the Power, by whom the path between heaven and earth has been laid open."[39]

Dante's soul—like the fire which falls to earth out of the swollen thunder-cloud, instead of rising according to the wont of fire—had grown too great for his still mortal nature; and he could afterwards find within him no memory of what it did.

"Open thine eyes," said Beatrice, "and see me now indeed. Thou hast beheld things that empower thee to sustain my smiling."

Dante, while doing as he was desired, felt like one who has suddenly waked up from a dream, and endeavours in vain to recollect it.

"Never," said he, "can that moment be erased from the book of the past. If all the tongues were granted me that were fed with the richest milk of Polyhymnia and her sisters, they could not express one thousandth part of the beauty of that divine smile, or of the thorough perfection which it made of the whole of her divine countenance."

But Beatrice said, "Why dost thou so enamour thee of this face, and lose the sight of the beautiful guide, blossoming beneath the beams of Christ? Behold the rose, in which the Word was made flesh.[40] Behold the lilies, by whose odour the way of life is tracked."

Dante looked, and gave battle to the sight with his weak eyes.[41]

As flowers on a cloudy day in a meadow are suddenly lit up by a gleam of sunshine, he beheld multitudes of splendours effulgent with beaming rays that smote on them from above, though he could not discern the source of the effulgence. He had invoked the name of the Virgin when he looked; and the gracious fountain of the light had drawn itself higher up within the heaven, to accommodate the radiance to his faculties. He then beheld the Virgin herself bodily present,—her who is fairest now in heaven, as she was on earth; and while his eyes were being painted with her beauty,[42] there fell on a sudden a seraphic light from heaven, which, spinning into a circle as it came, formed a diadem round her head, still spinning, and warbling as it spun. The sweetest melody that ever drew the soul to it on earth would have seemed like the splitting of a thunder-cloud, compared with the music that sung around the head of that jewel of Paradise.[43]

"I am Angelic Love," said the light, "and I spin for joy of the womb in which our Hope abided; and ever, O Lady of Heaven, must I thus attend thee, as long as thou art pleased to attend thy Son, journeying in his loving-kindness from sphere to sphere."

All the other splendours now resounded the name of Mary. The Virgin began ascending to pursue the path of her Son; and Dante, unable to endure her beauty as it rose, turned his eyes to the angelical callers on the name of Mary, who remained yearning after her with their hands outstretched, as a babe yearns after the bosom withdrawn from his lips. Then rising after her themselves, they halted ere they went out of sight, and sung "O Queen of Heaven" so sweetly, that the delight never quitted the air.

A flame now approached and thrice encircled Beatrice, singing all the while so divinely, that the poet could retain no idea expressive of its sweetness. Mortal imagination cannot unfold such wonder. It was Saint Peter, whom she had besought to come down from his higher sphere, in order to catechise and discourse with her companion on the subject of faith.

The catechising and the discourse ensued, and were concluded by the Apostle's giving the poet the benediction, and encircling his forehead thrice with his holy light. "So well," says Dante, "was he pleased with my answers."[44]

"If ever," continued the Florentine, "the sacred poem to which heaven and earth have set their hands, and which for years past has wasted my flesh in the writing, shall prevail against the cruelty that shut me out of the sweet fold in which I slept like a lamb, wishing harm to none but the wolves that beset it,—with another voice, and in another guise than now, will I return, a poet, and standing by the fount of my baptism, assume the crown that belongs to me; for I there first entered on the faith which gives souls to God; and for that faith did Peter thus encircle my forehead."[45]

A flame enclosing Saint James now succeeded to that of Saint Peter, and after greeting his predecessor as doves greet one another, murmuring and moving round, proceeded to examine the mortal visitant on the subject of Hope. The examination was closed amidst resounding anthems of," Let their hope be in thee;"[46] and a third apostolic flame ensued, enclosing Saint John, who completed the catechism with the topic of Charity. Dante acquitted himself with skill throughout; the spheres resounded with songs of "Holy, holy," Beatrice joining in the warble; and the poet suddenly found Adam beside him. The parent of the human race knew by intuition what his descendant wished to learn of him; and manifesting his assent before he spoke, as an animal sometimes does by movements and quiverings of the flesh within its coat, corresponding with its good-will,[47] told him, that his fall was not owing to the fruit which he tasted, but to the violation of the injunction not to taste it; that he remained in the Limbo on hell-borders upwards of five thousand years; and that the language he spoke had become obsolete before the days of Nimrod.

The gentle fire of Saint Peter now began to assume an awful brightness, such as the planet Jupiter might assume, if Mars and it were birds, and exchanged the colour of their plumage.[48] Silence fell upon the celestial choristers; and the Apostle spoke thus:

"Wonder not if thou seest me change colour. Thou wilt see, while I speak, all which is round about us colour in like manner. He who usurps my place on earth,—my place, I say,—ay, mine,—which before God is now vacant,—has converted the city in which my dust lies buried into a common-sewer of filth and blood; so that the fiend who fell from hence rejoices himself down there."

At these words of the Apostle the whole face of Heaven was covered with a blush, red as dawn or sunset; and Beatrice changed colour, like a maiden that shrinks in alarm from the report of blame in another. The eclipse was like that which took place when the Supreme died upon the Cross.

Saint Peter resumed with a voice not less awfully changed than his appearance:

"Not for the purpose of being sold for money was the spouse of Christ fed and nourished with my blood, and with the blood of Linus,—the blood of Cletus. Sextus did not bleed for it, nor Pius, nor Callixtus, nor Urban; men, for whose deaths all Christendom wept. They died that souls might be innocent and go to Heaven. Never was it intention of ours, that the sitters in the holy chair should divide one half of Christendom against the other; should turn my keys into ensigns of war against the faithful; and stamp my very image upon mercenary and lying documents, which make me, here in Heaven, blush and turn cold to think of. Arm of God, why sleepest thou? Men out of Gascony and Cahors are even now making ready to drink our blood. O lofty beginning, to what vile conclusion must thou come! But the high Providence, which made Scipio the sustainer of the Roman sovereignty of the world, will fail not its timely succour. And thou, my son, that for weight of thy mortal clothing must again descend to earth, see thou that thou openest thy mouth, and hidest not from others what has not been hidden from thyself."

As white and thick as the snows go streaming athwart the air when the sun is in Capricorn, so the angelical spirits that had been gathered in the air of Saturn streamed away after the Apostle, as he turned with the other saints to depart; and the eyes of Dante followed them till they became viewless.[49]

The divine eyes of Beatrice recalled him to herself; and at the same instant the two companions found themselves in the ninth Heaven or Primum Mobile, the last of the material Heavens, and the mover of those beneath it.

[Footnote 49: In spite of the unheavenly nature of invective, of something of a lurking conceit in the making an eclipse out of a blush, and in the positive bathos, and I fear almost indecent irrelevancy of the introduction of Beatrice at all on such an occasion, much more under the feeble aspect of one young lady blushing for another,—this scene altogether is a very grand one; and the violence itself of the holy invective awful.

Here he had a glimpse of the divine essence, in likeness of a point of inconceivably sharp brightness enringed with the angelic hierarchies. All earth, and heaven, and nature, hung from it. Beatrice explained many mysteries to him connected with that sight; and then vehemently denounced the false and foolish teachers that quit the authority of the Bible for speculations of their own, and degrade the preaching of the gospel with ribald jests, and legends of Saint Anthony and his pig.[50]

Returning, however, to more celestial thoughts, her face became so full of beauty, that Dante declares he must cease to endeavour to speak of it, and that he doubts whether the sight can ever be thoroughly enjoyed by any save its Maker.[51] Her look carried him upward as before, and he was now in the Empyrean, or region of Pure Light;—of light made of intellect full of love; love of truth, full of joy; joy, transcendant above all sweetness.

Streams of living radiance came rushing and flashing round about him, swathing him with light, as the lightning sometimes enwraps and dashes against the blinded eyes; but the light was love here, and instead of injuring, gave new power to the object it embraced.

With this new infusion of strength into his organs of vision, Dante looked, and saw a vast flood of it, effulgent with flashing splendours, and pouring down like a river between banks painted with the loveliest flowers. Fiery living sparkles arose from it on all sides, and pitched themselves into the cups of the flowers, where they remained awhile, like rubies set in gold; till inebriated with the odours, they recast themselves into the bosom of the flood; and ever as one returned, another leaped forth. Beatrice bade him dip his eyes into the light, that he might obtain power to see deeper into its nature; for the river, and the jewels that sprang out of it to and fro, and the laughing flowers on the banks, were themselves but shadows of the truth which they included; not, indeed, in their essential selves, but inasmuch as without further assistance the beholder's eyes could not see them as they were. Dante rushed to the stream as eagerly as the lips of an infant to the breast, when it has slept beyond its time; and his eyelashes had no sooner touched it, than the length of the river became a breadth and a circle, and its real nature lay unveiled before him, like a face when a mask is taken off. It was the whole two combined courts of Heaven, the angelical and the human, in circumference larger than would hold the sun, and all blazing beneath a light, which was reflected downwards in its turn upon the sphere of the Primum Mobile below it, the mover of the universe. And as a green cliff by the water's side seems to delight in seeing itself reflected from head to foot with all its verdure and its flowers; so, round about on all sides, upon thousands of thrones, the blessed spirits that once lived on earth sat beholding themselves in the light. And yet even all these together formed but the lowest part of the spectacle, which ascended above them, tier upon tier, in the manner of an immeasurable rose,—all dilating itself, doubling still and doubling, and all odorous with the praises of an ever-vernal sun. Into the base of it, as into the yellow of the flower, with a dumb glance that yet promised to speak, Beatrice drew forward her companion, and said, "Behold the innumerable assemblage of the white garments! Behold our city, how large its circuit! Behold our seats, which are, nevertheless, so full, that few comers are wanted to fill them! On that lofty one at which thou art looking, surmounted with the crown, and which shall be occupied before thou joinest this bridal feast, shall be seated the soul of the great Henry, who would fain set Italy right before she is prepared for it.[52] The blind waywardness of which ye are sick renders ye like the bantling who, while he is dying of hunger, kicks away his nurse. And Rome is governed by one that cannot walk in the same path with such a man, whatever be the road.[53] But God will not long endure him. He will be thrust down into the pit with Simon Magus; and his feet, when he arrives there, will thrust down the man of Alagna still lower.[54]"

In the form, then, of a white rose the blessed multitude of human souls lay manifest before the eyes of the poet; and now he observed, that the winged portion of the blest, the angels, who fly up with their wings nearer to Him that fills them with love, came to and fro upon the rose like bees; now descending into its bosom, now streaming back to the source of their affection. Their faces were all fire, their wings golden, their garments whiter than snow. Whenever they descended on the flower, they went from fold to fold, fanning their loins, and communicating the peace and ardour which they gathered as they gave. Dante beheld all,—every flight and action of the whole winged multitude,—without let or shadow; for he stood in the region of light itself, and light has no obstacle where it is deservedly vouchsafed.

"Oh," cries the poet, "if the barbarians that came from the north stood dumb with amazement to behold the magnificence of Rome, thinking they saw unearthly greatness in the Lateran, what must I have thought, who had thus come from human to divine, from time to eternity, from the people of Florence to beings just and sane?"

Dante stood, without a wish either to speak or to hear. He felt like a pilgrim who has arrived within the place of his devotion, and who looks round about him, hoping some day to relate what he sees. He gazed upwards and downwards, and on every side round about, and saw movements graceful with every truth of innocence, and faces full of loving persuasion, rich in their own smiles and in the light of the smiles of others.

He turned to Beatrice, but she was gone;—gone, as a messenger from herself told him, to resume her seat in the blessed rose, which the messenger accordingly pointed out. She sat in the third circle from the top, as far from Dante as the bottom of the sea is from the region of thunder; and yet he saw her as plainly as if she had been close at hand. He addressed words to her of thanks for all she had done for him, and a hope for her assistance after death; and she looked down at him and smiled.

The messenger was St. Bernard. He bade the poet lift his eyes higher; and Dante beheld the Virgin Mary sitting above the rose, in the centre of an intense redness of light, like another dawn. Thousands of angels were hanging buoyant around her, each having its own distinct splendour and adornment, and all were singing, and expressing heavenly mirth; and she smiled on them with such loveliness, that joy was in the eyes of all the blessed.

At Mary's feet was sitting Eve, beautiful—she that opened the wound which Mary closed; and at the feet of Eve was Rachel, with Beatrice; and at the feet of Rachel was Sarah, and then Judith, then Rebecca, then Ruth, ancestress of him out of whose penitence came the song of the Miserere;[55] and so other Hebrew women, down all the gradations of the flower, dividing, by the line which they made, the Christians who lived before Christ from those who lived after; a line which, on the opposite side of the rose, was answered by a similar one of Founders of the Church, at the top of whom was John the Baptist. The rose also was divided horizontally by a step which projected beyond the others, and underneath which, known by the childishness of their looks and voices, were the souls of such as were too young to have attained Heaven by assistance of good works.

St. Bernard then directed his companion to look again at the Virgin, and gather from her countenance the power of beholding the face of Christ as God. Her aspect was flooded with gladness from the spirits around her; while the angel who had descended to her on earth now hailed her above with "Ave, Maria!" singing till the whole host of Heaven joined in the song. St. Bernard then prayed to her for help to his companion's eyesight. Beatrice, with others of the blest, was seen joining in the prayer, their hands stretched upwards; and the Virgin, after benignly looking on the petitioners, gazed upwards herself, shewing the way with her own eyes to the still greater vision. Dante then looked also, and beheld what he had no words to speak, or memory to endure.

He awoke as from a dream, retaining only a sense of sweetness that ever trickled to his heart.

Earnestly praying afterwards, however, that grace might be so far vouchsafed to a portion of his recollection, as to enable him to convey to his fellow-creatures one smallest glimpse of the glory of what he saw, his ardour was so emboldened by help of the very mystery at whose sight he must have perished had he faltered, that his eyes, unblasted, attained to a perception of the Sum of Infinitude. He beheld, concentrated in one spot—written in one volume of Love—all which is diffused, and can become the subject of thought and study throughout the universe—all substance and accident and mode—all so compounded that they become one light. He thought he beheld at one and the same time the oneness of this knot, and the universality of all which it implies; because, when it came to his recollection, his heart dilated, and in the course of one moment he felt ages of impatience to speak of it.

But thoughts as well as words failed him; and though ever afterwards he could no more cease to yearn towards it, than he could take defect for completion, or separate the idea of happiness from the wish to attain it, still the utmost he could say of what he remembered would fall as short of right speech as the sounds of an infant's tongue while it is murmuring over the nipple; for the more he had looked at that light, the more he found in it to amaze him, so that his brain toiled with the succession of the astonishments. He saw, in the deep but clear self-subsistence, three circles of three different colours of the same breadth, one of them reflecting one of the others as rainbow does rainbow, and the third consisting of a fire equally breathing from both.[56]

O eternal Light! thou that dwellest in thyself alone, thou alone understandest thyself, and art by thyself understood, and, so understanding, thou laughest at thyself, and lovest.

The second, or reflected circle, as it went round, seemed to be painted by its own colours with the likeness of a human face.[57]

But how this was done, or how the beholder was to express it, threw his mind into the same state of bewilderment as the mathematician experiences when he vainly pores over the circle to discover the principle by which he is to square it.

He did, however, in a manner discern it. A flash of light was vouchsafed him for the purpose; but the light left him no power to impart the discernment; nor did he feel any longer impatient for the gift. Desire became absorbed in submission, moving in as smooth unison as the particles of a wheel, with the Love that is the mover of the sun and the stars.[58]

[Footnote 1: A curious and happy image.

"Tornan de' nostri visi le postille
Debili sì, che perla in bianca fronte
Non vien men tosto a le nostre pupille:
Tali vid' io più facce a parlar pronte." ]

[Footnote 2: "Rodolfo da Tossignano, Hist. Seraph. Relig. P. i. p. 138, as cited by Lombardi, relates the following legend of Piccarda: 'Her brother Corso, inflamed with rage against his virgin sister, having joined with him Farinata, an infamous assassin, and twelve other abandoned ruffians, entered the monastery by a ladder, and carried away his sister forcibly to his own house; and then, tearing off her religious habit, compelled her to go in a secular garment to her nuptials. Before the spouse of Christ came together with her new husband, she knelt down before a crucifix, and recommended her virginity to Christ. Soon after, her whole body was smitten with leprosy, so as to strike grief and horror into the beholders; and thus, in a few days, through the divine disposal, she passed with a palm of virginity to the Lord. Perhaps (adds the worthy Franciscan), our poet not being able to certify himself entirely of this occurrence, has chosen to pass it over discreetly, by making Piccarda say, 'God knows how, after that, my life was framed.'"—Cary, ut sup. p. 137.]

[Footnote 3: A lovely simile indeed.

"Tanto lieta
Ch' arder parea d'amor nel primo foco."

[Footnote 4: Costanza, daughter of Ruggieri, king of Sicily, thus taken out of the monastery, was mother to the Emperor Frederick the Second. "She was fifty years old or more at the time" (says Mr. Cary, quoting from Muratori and others); "and because it was not credited that she could have a child at that age, she was delivered in a pavilion; and it was given out, that any lady who pleased was at liberty to see her. Many came and saw her, and the suspicion ceased."—Translation of Dante, ut sup. p. 137.]

[Footnote 5: Probably an allusion to Dante's own wanderings.]

[Footnote 6:

"Hosanna Sanctus Deus Sabaoth
Superillustrans claritate tuâ
Felices ignes horum Malahoth."
Malahoth; Hebrew, kingdoms.]

[Footnote 7: The epithet is not too strong, as will be seen by the nature of the inhabitants.]

[Footnote 8: Charles Martel, son of the king of Naples and Sicily, and crowned king of Hungary, seems to have become acquainted with Dante during the poet's youth, when the prince met his royal father in the city of Florence. He was brother of Robert, who succeeded the father, and who was the friend of Petrarch.

"The adventures of Cunizza, overcome by the influence of her star," says Cary, "are related by the chronicler Rolandino of Padua, lib. i. cap. 3, in Muratori, Rer. Ital. Script. tom. viii. p. 173. She eloped from her first husband, Richard of St. Boniface, in the company of Sordello (see Purg. canto vi. and vii.); with whom she is supposed to have cohabited before her marriage: then lived with a soldier of Trevigi, whose wife was living at the same time in the same city; and, on his being murdered by her brother the tyrant, was by her brother married to a nobleman of Braganzo: lastly, when he also had fallen by the same hand, she, after her brother's death, was again wedded in Verona."—Translation of Dante, ut sup. p. 147. See what Foscolo says of her in the Discorso sul Testo, p. 329.

Folco, the gallant Troubadour, here placed between Cunizza and Rahab, is no other than Folques, bishop of Thoulouse, the persecutor of the Albigenses. It is of him the brutal anecdote is related, that, being asked, during an indiscriminate attack on that people, how the orthodox and heterodox were to be distinguished, he said, "Kill all: God will know his own."

For Rahab, see Joshua, chap. ii. and vi.; and Hebrews. xi. 31]

[Footnote 9: The reader need not be required to attend to the extraordinary theological disclosures in the whole of the preceding passage, nor yet to consider how much more they disclose, than theology or the poet might have desired.]

[Footnote 10: These fifteen personages are chiefly theologians and schoolmen, whose names and obsolete writings are, for the most part, no longer worth mention. The same may be said of the band that comes after them.

Dante should not have set them dancing. It is impossible (every respectfulness of endeavour notwithstanding) to maintain the gravity of one's imagination at the thought of a set of doctors of the Church, Venerable Bede included, wheeling about in giddy rapture like so many dancing dervises, and keeping time to their ecstatic anilities with voices tinkling like church-clocks. You may invest them with as much light or other blessed indistinctness as you please; the beards and the old ages will break through. In vain theologians may tell us that our imaginations are not exalted enough. The answer (if such a charge must be gravely met) is, that Dante's whole Heaven itself is not exalted enough, how ever wonderful and beautiful in parts. The schools, and the forms of Catholic worship, held even his imagination down. There is more heaven in one placid idea of love than in all these dances and tinklings.]

[Footnote 11:

"Benigno a' suoi, ed a' nimici crudo."

Cruel indeed;—the founder of the Inquisition! The "loving minion" is Mr. Cary's excellent translation of "amoroso drudo." But what a minion, and how loving! With fire and sword and devilry, and no wish (of course) to thrust his own will and pleasure, and bad arguments, down other people's throats! St. Dominic was a Spaniard. So was Borgia. So was Philip the Second. There seems to have been an inherent semi-barbarism in the character of Spain, which it has never got rid of to this day. If it were not for Cervantes, and some modern patriots, it would hardly appear to belong to the right European community. Even Lope de Vega was an inquisitor; and Mendoza, the entertaining author of Lazarillo de Tormes, a cruel statesman. Cervantes, however, is enough to sweeten a whole peninsula.]

[Footnote 12: What a pity the reporter of this advice had not humility enough to apply it to himself!]

[Footnote 13:

"O sanguis meus, o superinfusa
Gratia Dei, sicut tibi, cui
Bis unquam coeli janua reclusa?"

The spirit says this in Latin, as if to veil the compliment to the poet in "the obscurity of a learned language." And in truth it is a little strong.]

[Footnote 14:

"Che dentro a gli occhi suoi ardeva un riso
Tal, ch' io pensai co' miei toccar lo fondo
De la mia grazia e del mio Paradiso."

That is, says Lombardi, "I thought my eyes could not possibly be more favoured and imparadised" (Pensai che non potessero gli occhi miei essere graziati ed imparadisati maggiormente)—Variorum edition of Dante, Padua, 1822, vol. iii. p. 373.]

[Footnote 15: Here ensues the famous description of those earlier times in Florence, which Dante eulogises at the expense of his own. See the original passage, with another version, in the Appendix.]

[Footnote 16: Bellincion Berti was a noble Florentine, of the house of the Ravignani. Cianghella is said to have been an abandoned woman, of manners as shameless as her morals. Lapo Salterelli, one of the co-exiles of Dante, and specially hated by him, was a personage who appears to have exhibited the rare combination of judge and fop. An old commentator, in recording his attention to his hair, seems to intimate that Dante alludes to it in contrasting him with Cincinnatus. If so, Lapo might have reminded the poet of what Cicero says of his beloved Cæsar;—that he once saw him scratching the top of his head with the tip of his finger, that he might not discompose the locks.]

[Footnote 17:

"Chi ei si furo, e onde venner quivi,
Più è tacer che ragionare onesto."

Some think Dante was ashamed to speak of these ancestors, from the lowness of their origin; others that he did not choose to make them a boast, for the height of it. I suspect, with Lombardi, from his general character, and from the willingness he has avowed to make such boasts (see the opening of canto xvi., Paradise, in the original), that while he claimed for them a descent from the Romans (see Inferno, canto xv. 73, &c.), he knew them to be] poor in fortune, perhaps of humble condition. What follows, in the text of our abstract, about the purity of the old Florentine blood, even in the veins of the humblest mechanic, may seem to intimate some corroboration of this; and is a curious specimen of republican pride and scorn. This horror of one's neighbours is neither good Christianity, nor surely any very good omen of that Italian union, of which "Young Italy" wishes to think Dante such a harbinger.

All this too, observe, is said in the presence of a vision of Christ on the Cross!]

[Footnote 18: The Column, Verrey (vair, variegated, checkered with argent and azure), and the Balls or (Palle d'oro), were arms of old families. I do not trouble the reader with notes upon mere family-names, of which nothing else is recorded.]

[Footnote 19: An allusion, apparently acquiescent, to the superstitious popular opinion that the peace of Florence was bound up with the statue of Mars on the old bridge, at the base of which Buondelmonte was slain.

With this Buondelmonte the dissensions in Florence were supposed to have first begun. Macchiavelli's account of him is, that he was about to marry a young lady of the Amidei family, when a widow of one of the Donati, who had designed her own daughter for him, contrived that he should see her; the consequence of which was, that he broke his engagement, and was assassinated. Historie Fiorentine, lib. ii.]

[Footnote 20:

"Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta
Più caramente; e questo e quello strale
Che l'arco de l'esilio pria saetta.

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui, e com'è duro calle
Lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale.

E quel che più ti graverà le spalle,
Sarà la compagnia malvagia e scempia
Con la qual tu cadrai in questa valle:

Che tutta ingrata, tutta matta ed empia
Si farà contra te: ma poco appresso
Ella, non tu, n'avrà rossa la tempia.

Di sua bestialitate il suo processo
Farà la pruova, sì ch' a te fia bello
Averti fatta parte per te stesso."

[Footnote 21: The Roman eagle. These are the arms of the Scaligers of
Verona.]

[Footnote 22: A prophecy of the renown of Can Grande della Scala, who had received Dante at his court.]

[Footnote 23: "Letizia era ferza del paléo">[

[Footnote 24: Supposed to be one of the early Williams, Princes of Orange; but it is doubted whether the First, in the time of Charlemagne, or the Second, who followed Godfrey of Bouillon. Mr. Cary thinks the former; and the mention of his kinsman Rinaldo (Ariosto's Paladin?) seems to confirm his opinion; yet the situation of the name in the text brings it nearer to Godfrey; and Rinoardo (the name of Rinaldo in Dante) might possibly mean "Raimbaud," the kinsman and associate of the second William. Robert Guiscard is the Norman who conquered Naples.]

[Footnote 25: Exquisitely beautiful feeling!

[Footnote 29: Most beautiful is this simile of the lark:

"Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta
De l'ultima dolcezza che la sazia."

In the Pentameron and Pentalogia, Petrarch is made to say, "All the verses that ever were written on the nightingale are scarcely worth the beautiful triad of this divine poet on the lark [and then he repeats them]. In the first of them, do you not see the trembling of her wings against the sky? As often as I repeat them, my ear is satisfied, my heart (like hers) contented.

"Boccaccio.—I agree with you in the perfect and unrivalled beauty of the first; but in the third there is a redundance. Is not contenta quite enough without _che la sazia?_The picture is before us, the sentiment within us; and, behold, we kick when we are full of manna.

"Petrarch.—I acknowledge the correctness and propriety of your remark; and yet beauties in poetry must be examined as carefully as blemishes, and even more."—p. 92.

Perhaps Dante would have argued that sazia expresses the satiety itself, so that the very superfluousness becomes a propriety.]

[Footnote 30:

"E come a buon cantor buon citarista
Fa seguitar to guizzo de la corda
In che più di piacer lo canto acquista;

Sì, mentre che parlò, mi si ricorda,
Ch'io vidi le due luci benedette,
Pur come batter d'occhi si concorda,

Con le parole muover le fiammette." ]

[Footnote 31: A corrector of clerical abuses, who, though a cardinal, and much employed in public affairs, preferred the simplicity of a private life. He has left writings, the eloquence of which, according to Tiraboschi, is "worthy of a better age." Petrarch also makes honourable mention of him. See Cary, ut sup. p. 169. Dante lived a good while in the monastery of Catria, and is said to have finished his poem there.—Lombardi in loc. vol. III. p. 547.]

[Footnote 32: The cardinal's hat.]

[Footnote 33: "Sì che duo bestie van sott' una pelle.">[

[Footnote 34:

"Dintorno a questa (voce) vennero e fermarsi,
E fero un grido di sì alto suono,
Che non potrebbe qui assomigliarsi;

Nè io lo 'ntesi, sì mi vinse il tuono."

Around this voice they flocked, a mighty crowd,
And raised a shout so huge, that earthly wonder
Knoweth no likeness for a peal so loud;

Nor could I hear the words, it spoke such thunder.

If a Longinus had written after Dante, he would have put this passage into his treatise on the Sublime.]

[Footnote 35: Benedict, the founder of the order called after his name.
Macarius, an Egyptian monk and moralist. Romoaldo, founder of the
Camaldoli.]

[Footnote 36: The reader of English poetry will be reminded of a passage in Cowley

"Lo, I mount; and lo,
How small the biggest parts of earth's proud title shew!
Where shall I find the noble British land?
Lo, I at last a northern speck espy,
Which in the sea does lie,
And seems a grain o' the sand.
For this will any sin, or bleed?
Of civil wars is this the meed?
And is it this, alas, which we,
Oh, irony of words! do call Great Brittanie?"

And he afterwards, on reaching higher depths of silence, says very finely, and with a beautiful intimation of the all-inclusiveness of the Deity by the use of a singular instead of a plural verb,—

"Where am I now? angels and God is here."

All which follows in Dante, up to the appearance of Saint Peter, is full of grandeur and loveliness.]

[Footnote 37:

"Come l' augello intra l'amate fronde,
Posato al nido de' suoi dolci nati
La notte che le cose ci nasconde,

Che per veder gli aspetti desiati,
E per trovar lo cibo onde gli pasca,
In che i gravi labor gli sono aggrati,

Previene 'l tempo in su l'aperta frasca,
E con ardente affetto il sole aspetta,
Fiso guardando pur che l'alba nasca;

Così la donna mia si stava eretta
E attenta, involta in ver la plaga
Sotto la quale il sol mostra men fretta:

Sì the veggendola io sospesa e vaga,
Fecimi quale è quei che disiando
Altro vorria, e sperando s'appaga." ]

[Footnote 38:

"Quale ne' plenilunii sereni
Trivia ride tra le Ninfe eterne,
Che dipingono 'l ciel per tutti i seni."

[Footnote 39: He has seen Christ in his own unreflected person.]

[Footnote 40: The Virgin Mary.]

[Footnote 41:

"Mi rendei
A la battaglia de' debili cigli.">[

[Footnote 42:

"Ambo le luci mi dipinse."

[Footnote 43:

"Qualunque melodia più dolce suona
Qua giù, e più a se l'anima tira,
Parebbe nube che squarciata tuona,

Comparata al sonar di quella lira
Onde si coronava il bel zaffiro
Del quale il ciel più chiaro s' inzaffira." ]

[Footnote 44:

"Benedicendomi cantando
Tre volte cinse me, sì com' io tacqui,
L' Apostolico lume, al cui comando

Io avea detto; sì nel dir gli piacqui."

It was this passage, and the one that follows it, which led Foscolo to suspect that Dante wished to lay claim to a divine mission; an opinion which has excited great indignation among the orthodox. See his Discorso sul Testo, ut sup. pp. 61, 77-90 and 335-338; and the preface of the Milanese Editors to the "Convito" of Dante,—Opere Minori, 12mo, vol ii. p. xvii. Foscolo's conjecture seems hardly borne out by the context; but I think Dante had boldness and self-estimation enough to have advanced any claim whatsoever, had events turned out as he expected. What man but himself (supposing him the believer he professed to be) would have thought of thus making himself free of the courts of Heaven, and constituting St. Peter his applauding catechist!]

[Footnote 45: The verses quoted in the preceding note conclude the twenty-fourth canto of Paradise; and those, of which the passage just given is a translation, commence the twenty-fifth:

"Se mai continga, che 'l poema sacro
Al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra
Sì che m' ha fatto per più anni macro,

Vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra
Del bello ovile ov' io dormi' agnello
Nimico a' lupi che gli danno guerra;

Con altra voce omai, con altro vello
Ritornerò poeta, ed in sul fonte
Del mio battesmo prenderò 'l capello:

Perocchè ne la fede che fa conte
L' anime a Dio, quiv' entra' io, e poi
Pietro per lei sì mi girò la fronte." ]

[Footnote 46: "Sperent in te." Psalm ix. 10. The English version says,
"And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee.">[

[Footnote 47:

"Tal volta un animal coverto broglia
Sì che l' affetto convien che si paia
Per lo seguir che face a lui la 'nvoglia."

A natural, but strange, and surely not sufficiently dignified image for the occasion. It is difficult to be quite content with a former one, in which the greetings of St. Peter and St. James are compared to those of doves murmuring and sidling round about one another; though Christian sentiment may warrant it, if we do not too strongly present the Apostles to one's imagination.]

[Footnote 48:

"Tal ne la sembianza sua divenne,
Qual diverebbe Giove, s' egli e Marte
Fossero augelli e cambiassersi penne."

Nobody who opened the Commedia for the first time at this fantastical image would suppose the author was a great poet, or expect the tremendous passage that ensues!]

[Footnote 49: In spite of the unheavenly nature of invective, of something of a lurking conceit in the making an eclipse out of a blush, and in the positive bathos, and I fear almost indecent irrelevancy of the introduction of Beatrice at all on such an occasion, much more under the feeble aspect of one young lady blushing for another,—this scene altogether is a very grand one; and the violence itself of the holy invective awful.

A curious subject for reflection is here presented. What sort of pope would Dante himself have made? Would he have taken to the loving or the hating side of his genius? To the St. John or the St. Peter of his own poem? St. Francis or St. Dominic?—I am afraid, all things considered, we should have had in him rather a Gregory the Seventh or Julius the Second, than a Benedict the Eleventh or a Ganganelli. What fine Church-hymns he would have written!]

[Footnote 50: She does not see (so blind is even holy vehemence!) that for the same reason the denouncement itself is out of its place. The preachers brought St. Anthony and his pig into their pulpits; she brings them into Heaven!]

[Footnote 51:

"Certo io credo
Che solo il suo fattor tutta la goda." ]

[Footnote 52: The Emperor Henry of Luxembourg, Dante's idol; at the close of whose brief and inefficient appearance in Italy, his hopes of restoration to his country were at an end.]

[Footnote 53: Pope Clement the Fifth. Dante's enemy, Boniface, was now dead, and of course in Tartarus, in the red-hot tomb which the poet had prepared for him.]

[Footnote 54: Boniface himself. Pope Clement's red hot feet are to thrust down Pope Boniface into a gulf still hotter. So says the gentle Beatrice in Heaven, and in the face of all that is angelical!]

[Footnote 55: David.]

[Footnote 56: The Trinity.]

[Footnote 57: The Incarnation.]

[Footnote 58: In the Variorum edition of Dante, ut sup. vol. iii. p. 845, we are informed that a gentleman of Naples, the Cavaliere Giuseppe de Cesare, was the first to notice (not long since, I presume) the curious circumstance of Dante's having terminated the three portions of his poem with the word "stars." He thinks that it was done as a happy augury of life and renown to the subject. The literal intention, however, seems to have been to shew us, how all his aspirations terminated.]