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

we rise
Mad with revenge, to make a swift reprise:
And Theseus first, ‘What frenzy has possessed,
O Eurytus,’ he cried, ‘thy brutal breast,
To wrong Pirithous, and not him alone,
But, while I live, two friends conjoined in one?’ ”

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Judges 7:5, 6:⁠—

“So he brought down the people unto the water: and the Lord said unto Gideon, Every one that lappeth of the water with his tongue, as a dog lappeth, him shalt thou set by himself; likewise every one that boweth down upon his knees to drink. And the number of them that lapped, putting their hand to their mouth, were three hundred men; but all the rest of the people bowed down upon their knees to drink water.”

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The Angel of the Seventh Circle. ↩

The ascent to the Seventh Circle of Purgatory, where the sin of Lust is punished. ↩

When the sign of Taurus reached the meridian, the sun, being in Aries, would be two hours beyond it. It is now two o’clock of the afternoon. The Scorpion is the sign opposite Taurus. ↩

Shakespeare, Hamlet, I 2:⁠—

“And did address
Itself to motion, like as it would speak.”

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Meleager was the son of Oeneus and Althaea, of Calydon. At his birth the Fates were present and predicted his future greatness. Clotho said that he would be brave; Lachesis, that he would be strong; and Atropos, that he would live as long as the brand upon the fire remained unconsumed.

Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII:⁠—

“There lay a log unlighted on the hearth,
When she was laboring in the throes of birth
For th’ unborn chief; the fatal sisters came,
And raised it up, and tossed it on the flame
Then on the rock a scanty measure place
Of vital flax, and turned the wheel apace;
And turning sung, ‘To this red brand and thee,
O new-born babe, we give an equal destiny’;
So vanished out of view. The frighted dame
Sprung hasty from her bed, and quenched the flame.
The log, in secret locked, she kept with care,
And that, while thus preserved, preserved her heir.”

Meleager distinguished himself in the Argonautic expedition, and afterwards in the hunt of Calydon, where he killed the famous boar, and gave the boar’s head to Atalanta; and when his uncles tried to take possession of it, he killed them also. On hearing this, and seeing the dead bodies, his mother in her rage threw the brand upon the fire again, and, as it was consumed, Meleager perished.

Mr. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon:⁠—

Chorus

“When thou dravest the men
Of the chosen of Thrace,
None turned him again
Nor endured he thy face
Clothed round with the blush of the battle, with light from a terrible place.

Oeneus

“Thou shouldst die as he dies
For whom none sheddeth tears;
Filling thine eyes
And fulfilling thine ears
With the brilliance of battle, the bloom and the beauty, the splendor of spears.

Chorus

“In the ears of the world
It is sung, it is told,
And the light thereof hurled
And the noise thereof rolled
From the Acroceraunian snow to the ford of the fleece of gold.

Meleager

“Would God ye could carry me
Forth of all these;
Heap sand and bury me
By the Chersonese
Where the thundering Bosphorus answers the thunder of Pontic seas.

Oeneus

“Dost thou mock at our praise
And the singing begun
And the men of strange days
Praising my son
In the folds of the hills of home, high places of Calydon?

Meleager

“For the dead man no home is;
Ah, better to be
What the flower of the foam is
In fields of the sea,
That the sea-waves might be as my raiment, the gulf-stream a garment for me.

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“Mother, I dying with unforgetful tongue
Hail thee as holy and worship thee as just
Who art unjust and unholy; and with my knees
Would worship, but thy fire and subtlety,
Dissundering them, devour me; for these limbs
Are as light dustand Grumblings from mine urn
Before the fire has touched them; and my face
As a dead leaf or dead foot’s mark on snow,
And all this body a broken barren tree
That was so strong, and all this flower of life
Disbranched and desecrated miserably,
And minished all that god-like muscle and might
And lesser than a man’s: for all my veins
Fail me, and all mine ashen down.”

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The dissertation which Dante here puts into the mouth of Statius maybe found also in a briefer prose form in the Convito, IV 21. It so much excites the enthusiasm of Varchi, that he declares it alone sufficient to prove Dante to have been a physician, philosopher, and theologian of the highest order; and goes on to say:⁠—

“I not only confess, but I swear, that as many times as I have read it, which day and night are more than a thousand, my wonder and astonishment have always increased, seeming every time to find therein new beauties and new instruction, and consequently new difficulties.”

This subject is also discussed in part by Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I Quaest. CXIX, De propagations hominis quantum ad corpus.

Milton, in his Latin poem, De Idea Platonica, has touched upon a theme somewhat akin to this, but in a manner to make it seem very remote. Perhaps no two passages could better show the difference between Dante and Milton, than this canto and “Plato’s Archetypal Man,” which in Leigh Hunt’s translation runs as follows:⁠—

“Say, guardian goddesses of woods,
Aspects, felt in solitudes;
And Memory, at whose blessed knee
The Nine, which thy dear daughters be,
Learnt “of the majestic past;
And thou, that in some antre vast
Leaning afar off dost lie,
Otiose Eternity,
Keeping the tablets and decrees
Of Jove, and the ephemerides
Of the gods, and calendars,
Of the ever festal stars;
Say, who was he, the sunless shade,
After whose pattern man was made;
He first, the full of ages, born
With the old pale polar morn,
Sole, yet all; first visible thought,
After which the Deity wrought?
Twin-birth with Pallas, not remain
Doth he in Jove’s o’crshadowed brain;
But though of wide communion,
Dwells apart,