The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

that many were and great,
Of infants and of women and of men.”

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The three Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. ↩

The four Cardinal Virtues, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. ↩

John 12:35:⁠—

“Then Jesus said unto them. Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.”

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In the Middle Ages the longing for rest and escape from danger, which found its expression in cloisters, is expressed in poetry by descriptions of flowery, secluded meadows, suggesting the classic meadows of asphodel. Dante has given one already in the Inferno, and gives another here.

Compare with these the following from The Miracles of Our Lady, by Gonzalo de Bercéo, a monk of Calahorra, who lived in the thirteenth century, and is the oldest of the Castilian poets whose name has come down to us:⁠—

“I, Gonzalo de Bercéo, in the gentle summer-tide,
Wending upon a pilgrimage, came to a meadow’s side;
All green was it and beautiful, with flowers far and wide,
A pleasant spot, I ween, wherein the traveller might abide.
Flowers with the sweetest odors filled all the sunny air,
And not alone refreshed the sense, but stole the mind from care;
On every side a fountain gushed, whose waters pure and fair
Ice-cold beneath the summer sun, but warm in winter were.
There on the thick and shadowy trees, amid the foliage green,
Were the fig and the pomegranate, the pear and apple seen,
And other fruits of various kinds, the tufted leaves between;
None were unpleasant to the taste and none decayed, I ween.
The verdure of the meadow green, the odor of the flowers,
The grateful shadows of the trees, tempered with fragrant showers,
Refreshed me in the burning heat of the sultry noontide hours;
O, one might live upon the balm and fragrance of those bowers.
Ne’er had I found on earth a spot that had such power to please,
Such shadows from the summer sun, such odors on the breeze;
I threw my mantle on the ground, that I might rest at ease,
And stretched upon the greensward lay in the shadow of the trees.
There, soft reclining in the shade, all cares beside me flung,
I heard the soft and mellow notes that through the woodland rung.
Ear never listened to a strain, from instrument or tongue,
So mellow and harmonious as the songs above me sung.”

See also Brunetto Latini, Tesoretto, XIX; the Vision of Piers Ploughman; Gower’s Confessio Amantis, VIII, etc. ↩

Of this description Ruskin, Modern Painters, III 228, remarks:⁠—

“Now, almost in the opening of the Purgatory, as there at the entrance of the Inferno, we find a company of great ones resting in a grassy place. But the idea of the grass now is very different. The word now used is not ‘enamel,’ but ‘herb,’ and instead of being merely green, it is covered with flowers of many colors. With the usual mediseval accuracy, Dante insists on telling us precisely what these colors were, and how bright; which he does by naming the actual pigments used in illumination⁠—‘Gold, and fine silver, and cochineal, and white lead, and Indian wood, serene and lucid, and fresh emerald, just broken, would have been excelled, as less is by greater, by the flowers and grass of the place.’ It is evident that the ‘emerald’ here means the emerald green of the illuminators; for a fresh emerald is no brighter than one which is not fresh, and Dante was not one to throw away his words thus. Observe, then, we have here the idea of the growth, life, and variegation of the ‘green herb,’ as opposed to the smalto of the Inferno; but the colors of the variegation are illustrated and defined by the reference to actual pigments; and, observe, because the other colors are rather bright, the blue ground (Indian wood, indigo?) is sober; lucid, but serene; and presently two angels enter, who are dressed in the green drapery, but of a paler green than the grass, which Dante marks, by telling us that it was ‘the green of leaves just budded.’

“In all this, I wish the reader to observe two things: first, the general carefulness of the poet in defining color, distinguishing it precisely as a painter would (opposed to the Greek carelessness about it); and, secondly, his regarding the grass for its greenness and variegation, rather than, as a Greek would have done, for its depth and freshness. This greenness or brightness, and variegation, are taken up by later and modern poets, as the things intended to be chiefly expressed by the word ‘enamelled’; and, gradually, the term is taken to indicate any kind of bright and interchangeable coloring; there being always this much of propriety about it, when used of greensward, that such sward is indeed, like enamel, a coat of bright color on a comparatively dark ground; and is thus a sort of natural jewelry and painter’s work, different from loose and large vegetation. The word is often awkwardly and falsely used, by the later poets, of all kinds of growth and color; as by Milton of the flowers of Paradise showing themselves over its wall; but it retains, nevertheless, through all its jaded inanity, some halfunconscious vestige of the old sense, even to the present day.”

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The old church hymn attributed to Arminius or Hermann, Count of Vehringen, in the eleventh century, beginning:⁠—

“Salve Regina, mater misericordiae,
Vita, dulcedo et spas nostra, salve.”

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Rudolph of Hapsburg, first Emperor of the house of Austria, was crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1273. “It is related,” says Voltaire, Annales de l’Empire, I 303, “that, as the imperial sword, which they pretended was that of Charlemagne, could not be found, several lords made this defect in the formalities a pretext for not taking the