Let us now accompany Dante through the Underworld. The scene opens at dawn in a dark and tangled wood. Dante, the type of humanity, is unable to ascend the Hill of the Lord, as we said before, because his way is barred successively by a leopard, a lion and a wolf, representing the passions of life. Virgil (Reason), sent by Beatrice (Revelation), offers to conduct the poet by another road. It is a way which leads through Hell and Purgatory. Through the heavens Beatrice herself will be the guide. Descending through the earth the two poets come to the Vestibule of Hell. On the gate appears this inscription:
"Through me you pass into the city of woe
Through me you pass into eternal pain
Through me among the people lost for aye
Justice, the founder of my fabric, moved
To rear me was the task of Power divine,
Supremest wisdom and primeval Love
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here."
It may be said in passing that in these nine lines Dante attains an effect for which Milton, with all his heavy description of the gateway of Hell, labors in vain. Contrast with the Florentine's the words of the author of Paradise Lost:
"Hell bounds high reaching to the horrid roof
And thrice three fold the gates: three folds were brass,
Three iron, three of adamantine rock.
Impenetrable, impaled with circling fire,
Yet unconsumed. Before the gate there sat
On either side a formidable shape," etc.
Not by gigantic images which only astonish the reader, but by words which burn into the brain and leave him dismayed, does our poet drive home his thought.
Passing through a crowd of neutrals the poets come to the river Acheron, where assemble those who die in mortal sin, to be ferried over by the demon Charon. He refuses passage to Dante: "By other ways, by other ferries, shalt thou pass over, a lighter boat must carry thee." (Inf., III, 91.) An earthquake occurs, accompanied with wind and lightning, and Dante falls into a state of insensibility. Upon coming to consciousness he finds himself on the brink of the Abyss, whence the poets enter Limbo. Here Christ descended, Virgil says, and "drew from us the shade of our first parent, of Abel, his son; that of Noah, of Moses, the lawgiver, the obedient; patriarch Abraham and King David; Israel, with his father, and with his sons and with Rachel, for whom he wrought much, and many others and made them blessed." (Inf., IV, 55.)
In the second circle, where carnal sinners are punished, Dante sees, among others, Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Achilles, Paris. The poet's attention is suddenly attracted by two spirits, who prove to be Francesca da Rimini and her lover, Paolo, murdered by her husband when Dante was twenty-four years old. The scandal of their illicit love and the penalty they paid by their lives must have been so generally known that Dante, though attached to her family by the memory of hospitality received from her nephew, Guido Novello da Polenta, the lord of Ravenna, is dominated by the necessity of declaring in Francesca and Paolo the operation of the unalterable law which rules the terrible consequences of crime unforgiven by Heaven. Was it gratitude for kindness extended to him, an exile, by the Lord of Ravenna, or was it the memory of association with the brother of Francesca, at the battle of Campaldino, that led our poet to treat the whole episode of the fatal liaison with such tender sympathy for the unfortunate lady that he hoped to rehabilitate her memory? In any event, the poet represents himself as gracious and benign when addressing Francesca, and she, moved by his friendly attitude, tells the story of her intrigue, in lines justly regarded as the most beautiful ever written in verse. The reader will not fail to observe that the fatal denouement is only hinted, not told—the line, "that day we read no more," making what is admitted to be the finest ellipsis in all the literature of the world.
"Then turning, I to them, my speech address'd
And thus began: 'Francesca! Your sad fate
Even to tears my grief and pity moves.
But tell me, in the time of your sweet sighs,
By what and how Love granted that ye knew
Your yet uncertain wishes.' She replied:
'No greater grief than to remember days
Of joy, when misery is at hand. Yet so eagerly
If thou art bent to know the primal root
From whence our love gat being, I will do
As one who weeps and tells his tale. One day
For our delight, we read of Lancelot,
How him love thrall'd. Alone we were, and no
Suspicion near us. Oft times by that reading
Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue
Fled from our alter'd cheek. But at one point
Alone we fell. When of that smile, we read,
The wish'd smile so rapturously kiss'd
By one so deep in love, then he who ne'er
From me shall separate, at once my lips
All trembling kiss'd. The book and writer both
Were love's purveyors. In its leaves that day
We read no more.' While thus one spirit spake,
The other wail'd so sorely, that heart-struck
I through compassion fainting, seem'd not far
From death, and like a corse fell to the ground."
In the next circle where, with faces to the ground, the gluttons suffer in a ceaseles storm, the shade of Ciacco, the Florentine, sits up as he recognizes a fellow-citizen: