the Milanese who blazoned a viper on his shield.
He thinks that his wife has ceased to love him as she has discarded her "white wimples," which, if she marries this inferior person, she may long for once again! And he adds, rather cynically, for a
blessed soul in Purgatory, that through her one may mightily well
know how short a time love may last in woman, if the eye and the touch do not keep it alive.
One must admit that there is an element of humour—not for the victim—in the "Inferno," when Dante puts Pope Boniface VIII. into Hell three and a half years before he died! Nicholas III., whom Dante thought guilty of the unpardonable sin of simony, had preceded Boniface; and he says,
E se non fosse ch' ancor lo mi vieta
la riverenza delle somme chiavi,
che tu tenesti nella vita lieta
l' userei parole ancor più gravi—
But for consolation, there is no great poem so good as the "Paradiso."
English and American Verse
Edmund Clarence Stedman tells us how thrilled the youths of his generation were when the new poet, Tennyson, "swam into their ken." It is difficult for the young of to-day to believe this. There is no great reigning poet to-day; there are
great numbers of fair poets, who are hailed as crown princes by the groups that gather about them. Whatever the old may say, this is a good sign. Any evidence of a sincere interest in poetry is a good sign. Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women" and his portrait studies broke in on the old tradition. "The Lady of Shalott," with its pictures of silence and its fine transmutation of commonplace into something very beautiful, was new.