"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.]