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

Henry Vaughan, Sacred Poems:⁠—

“O holy hope and high humility,
High as the heavens above;
These are your walks, and you have showed them me
To kindle my cold love!”

And Milton, Sams. Agon., 185:⁠—

“Apt words have power to swage
The tumors of a troubled mind.”

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A haughty and ambitious nobleman of Siena, who led the Sienese troops at the battle of Monte Aperto. Afterwards, when the Sienese were routed by the Florentines at the battle of Colle in the Val d’ Elsa, (Note 772,) he was taken prisoner “and his head was cut off,” says Villani, VII 31, “and carried through all the camp fixed upon a lance. And well was fulfilled the prophecy and revelation which the Devil had made to him, by means of necromancy, but which he did not understand; for the Devil, being constrained to tell how he would succeed in that battle, mendaciously answered, and said: ‘Thou shalt go forth and fight, thou shalt conquer not die in the battle, and thy head shall be the highest in the camp.’ And he, believing from these words that he should be victorious, and believing he should be lord over all, did not put a stop after ‘not’ (vincerai no, morrai, thou shalt conquer not, thou shalt die). And therefore it is great folly to put faith in the Devil’s advice. This Messer Provenzano was a great man in Siena after his victory at Monte Aperto, and led the whole city, and all the Ghibelline party of Tuscany made him their chief, and he was very presumptuous in his will.”

The humility which saved him was his seating himself at a little table in the public square of Siena, called the Campo, and begging money of all passers to pay the ransom of a friend who had been taken prisoner by Charles of Anjou, as here narrated by Dante. ↩

Spenser, Faery Queene, VI c. 7, st. 22:⁠—

“He, therewith much abashed and affrayd,
Began to tremble every limbe and vaine.”

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A prophecy of Dante’s banishment and poverty and humiliation. ↩

In the first part of this canto the same subject is continued, with examples of pride humbled, sculptured on the pavement, upon which the Proud are doomed to gaze as they go with their heads bent down beneath their heavy burdens,

“So that they may behold their evil ways.”

Iliad, XIII 700:⁠—

“And Ajax, the swift son of Oileus, never at all stood apart from the Telamonian Ajax; but as in a fallow field two dark bullocks, possessed of equal spirit, drag the compacted plough, and much sweat breaks out about the roots of their horns, and the well-polished yoke alone divides them, stepping along the furrow, and the plough cuts up the bottom of the soil, so they, joined together, stood very near to each other.”

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In Italy a pedagogue is not only a teacher, but literally a leader of children, and goes from house to house collecting his little flock, which he brings home again after school.

Galatians 3:24:⁠—

“The law was our schoolmaster (Paidagogos) to bring us unto Christ.”

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Tombs under the pavement in the aisles of churches, in contradistinction to those built aloft against the walls. ↩

The reader will not fail to mark the artistic structure of the passage from this to the sixty-third line. First there are four stanzas beginning, “I saw”; then four beginning, “O”; then four beginning, “Displayed”; and then a stanza which resumes and unites them all. ↩

Luke 10:18:⁠—

“I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.”

Milton, Paradise Lost, I 44:⁠—

“Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.”

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Iliad, I 403:⁠—

“Him of the hundred hands, whom the gods call Briareus, and all men Aegaeon.”

Note 472.

He was struck by the thunderbolt of Jove, or by a shaft of Apollo, at the battle of Flegra. “Ugly medley of sacred and profane, of revealed truth and fiction!” exclaims Venturi. ↩

Thymbraeus, a surname of Apollo, from his temple in Thymbra. ↩

Nimrod, who “began to be a mighty one in the earth,” and his “tower whose top may reach unto heaven.”

Genesis 11:8:⁠—

“So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth, and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”

See also Note 470. ↩

Lombardi proposes in this line to read “together” instead of “proud”; which Biagioli thinks is “changing a beautiful diamond for a bit of lead; and stupid is he who accepts the change.” ↩

Among the Greek epigrams is one on Niobe, which runs as follows:⁠—

“This sepulchre within it has no corse;
This corse without here has no sepulchre,
But to itself is sepulchre and corse.”

Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, Croxall’s Tr.:⁠—

“Widowed and childless, lamentable state!
A doleful sight, among the dead she sate;
Hardened with woes, a statue of despair,
To every breath of wind unmoved her hair;
Her cheek still reddening, but its color dead,
Faded her eyes, and set within her head.
No more her pliant tongue its motion keeps,
But stands congealed within her frozen lips.
Stagnate and dull, within her purple veins,
Its current stopped, the lifeless blood remains.
Her feet their usual offices refuse,
Her arms and neck their graceful gestures lose:
Action and life from every part are gone,
And even her entrails turn to solid stone;
Yet still she weeps, and whirled by stormy winds,
Borne through the air, her native country