[388] Purg. xiv. 148-151.
[389] “O unspeakable Wisdom who hast thus ordained, how poor is our intellect to understand Thee! And you, for whose benefit and pleasure I am writing, in what blindness you live, not lifting up your eyes to these things, but keeping them fixed on the slough of your folly.”
[390] “And the sky revolves like a mill-stone.” El. Ast. ch. vii.
[391] “There the sky will revolve, with all its stars,
mill-stone fashion.” Comp. del Mondo. I. xxiii.
[392] “It follows that Maria must see this sun ‘circling the world’ like a mill.” Conv. III. v. 142-147.
[393] “A winding path, which the learned call a spiral.”
[394] “Lucan, who was well known to Dante, had observed that shadows cast by the sun in the southern hemisphere travel to the right instead of to the left, and fall southwards when with us they fall to the north.” Moore, Studies in Dante i. p. 239.
“If their pathway were not thus inflected, Much virtue in the heavens would be in vain, And almost every power below here dead.” Par. x. 16-18. (Longfellow).