‘The delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice.’
So Milton: ‘In fierce heat and in ice.’
[178] ‘Senza riposo mai era la tresca Delle misere mani, or quindi or quinci Iscotendo da se l’arsura fresca’ (Inf. xiv. 40-42); and in Inf. xvii. 47-48: ‘Di quà di là soccorrien con le mani, Quando a’ vapor, e quando al caldo suolo.’
[179] Inf. v., where Dante couples with them the angels who abstained from taking either part on Satan’s revolt, but per sè foro. In like manner the Irish writers, as in the story of St. Brendan, extended their more merciful judgment to these spirits also. The popular traditions of modern times identify them with the Daoine Sidhe, but without agreeing as to their ultimate fate after the Judgment.
[180] Cp. the devices to which Christian redactors of Pagan legends had recourse, in order to bring the national heroes within the pale of salvation: e.g. Cuchulainn, Concobar, Finn Mac Cumhal, Caoilte, Cormac Mac Áirt, Fintan, Tuan Mac Cairill, etc. The early Christian writers dealt in like manner with Seneca, Trajan, Statius, Lucan, etc.; to whom Dante, apparently on his own responsibility, added Rhipeus.
[181] This is the doctrine of St. Augustine, which Dante followed in Inf. vi. 106 sqq.
[182] Cp. the brazen wall wrapped in flame in the Revelation of St. Paul.
[183] Cp. Revelation ix. 6, upon the authority of which text a similar passage is introduced into many of the mediæval descriptions of Hell. Cp. the Book of Adam, where the damned ‘call aloud for the second death, and the second death is deaf to their prayer’ (Ancona, op. cit. 107). So Dante, ‘che la seconda morte ciascun gride’ (Inf. i. 115). Cp. too Dante, Inf. iii. 124-6, where the guilty are eager to cross the river to their place of suffering: ‘Chè la divina giustigia gli sprona Sì che la tema si volge in disio,’ when, however, Dante was probably following Virgil, Æneid, vi. 313-14.