The encounter of Dante with Farinata and Cavalcante in their fiery tombs is also painted with such animated and fortunate strokes that we must reproduce some of them here:—
"'O Tuscan! thou who com'st with gentle speech.
Through Hell's hot city, breathing from the earth,
Stop in this place one moment, I beseech:
Thy tongue betrays the country of thy birth.
Of that illustrious land I know thee sprung,
Which in my day perchance I somewhat vexed.'
Forth from one vault these sudden accents rung,
So that I trembling stood with fear perplexed.
Then as I closer to my master drew.
'Turn back! what dost thou?' he exclaimed in haste;
'See! Farinata rises to thy view;
Now mayst behold him upward from his waist.'
"Full in his face already I was gazing,
While his front lowered, and his proud bosom swelled,
As though even there, amid his burial blazing,
The infernal realm in high disdain he held."
In this scene, however, the radical defect of Dr. Parsons's work appears: it is unequal, and unsustained even in some of its best parts. It seems scarcely credible that the poet who could produce the grand lines just given, could also mar the whole effect of the father's frantic appeal to know if his son Guido be no longer alive, by putting in his mouth the melodramatic words,
"Sayest thou, 'he had'? what mean ye! is he dead?"
But our translator does this, and he makes Ugolino report little Anselm as saying,
"Thou look'st so, father! what's the matter, what?"
—a line that Melpomene herself could not read with tragic effect,—for,
"Disse; tu guardi si, padre; che hai?"
As he likewise causes Francesca to say,