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

like one alone;
And fills the wondering embrace,
(Doubt it not) of size and place.
Whether, companion of the stars,
With their tenfold round he errs;
Or inhabits with his lone
Nature in the neighboring moon;
Or sits with body-waiting souls,
Dozing by the Lethaean pools:⁠—
Or whether, haply, placed afar
In some blank region of our star,
He stalks, an unsubstantial heap,
Humanity’s giant archetype;
Where a loftier bulk he rears
Than Atlas, grappler of the stars,
And through their shadow-touched abodes
Brings a terror to the gods.
Not the seer of him had sight,
Who found in darkness depths of light;2107
His travelled eyeballs saw him not
In all his mighty gulfs of thought:⁠—
Him the farthest-footed good,
Pleiad Mercury, never showed
To any poet’s wisest sight
In the silence of the night:⁠—
News of him the Assyrian priest2108
Found not in his sacred list,
Though he traced back old king Nine,
And Belus, elder name divine,
And Osiris, endless famed.
Not the glory, triple-named,
Thrice great Hermes, though his eyes
Read the shapes of all the skies,
Left him in his sacred verse
Revealed to Nature’s worshippers.

“O Plato! and was this a dream
Of thine in bowery Academe?
Wert thou the golden tongue to tell
First of this high miracle,
And charm him to thy schools below?
O call thy poets back, if so,2109
Back to the state thine exiles call,
Thou greatest fabler of them all;
Or follow through the self-same gate,
Thou, the founder of the state.”

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The heart, where the blood takes the “virtue informative,” as stated in line 40. ↩

The vegetative soul, virhich in man differs from that in plants, as being in a state of development, while that of plants is complete already. ↩

The vegetative becomes a sensitive soul. ↩

“This was the opinion of Averroes,” says the Ottimo, “which is false, and contrary to the Catholic faith.”

In the language of the Schools, the Possible Intellect, intellectus possibilis, is the faculty which receives impressions through the senses, and forms from them pictures or phantasmata in the mind. The Active Intellect, intellectus agens, draws from these pictures various ideas, notions, and conclusions. They represent the Understanding and the Reason. ↩

God. ↩

Redi, “Bacchus in Tuscany”:⁠—

“Such bright blood is a ray enkindled
Of that sun, in heaven that shines,
And has been left behind entangled
And caught in the net of the many vines.”

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When Lachesis has spun out the thread of life. ↩

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I Quaest. CXVIII Art. 3:⁠—

“Anima intellectiva remanet destructo corpore.”

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Either upon the shores of Acheron or of the Tiber. ↩

Aeneid, VI 723, Davidson’s Tr.:⁠—

“In the first place, the spirit within nourishes the heavens, the earth, and watery plains, the moon’s enlightened orb, and the Titanian stars; and the mind, diffused through all the members, actuates the whole frame, and mingles with the vast body of the universe. Thence the race of men and beasts, the vital principles of the flying kind, and the monsters which the ocean breeds under its smooth plain. These principles have the active force of fire, and are of a heavenly original, so far as they are not clogged by noxious bodies, blunted by earthborn limbs and dying members. Hence they fear and desire, grieve and rejoice; and, shut up in darkness and a gloomy prison, lose sight of their native skies. Even when with the last beams of light their life is gone, yet not every ill, nor all corporeal stains, are quite removed from the unhappy beings; and it is absolutely necessary that many imperfections which have long been joined to the soul should be in marvellous ways increased and riveted therein. Therefore are they afflicted with punishments, and pay the penalties of their former ills. Some, hung on high, are spread out to the empty winds; in others, the guilt not done away is washed out in a vast watery abyss, or burned away in fire. We each endure his own manes, thence are we conveyed along the spacious Elysium, and we, the happy few, possess the fields of bliss; till length of time, after the fixed period is elapsed, hath done away the inherent stain, and hath left the pure celestial reason, and the fiery energy of the simple spirit.”

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“God of clemency supreme”; the church hymn, sung at matins on Saturday morning, and containing a prayer for purity. ↩

Luke 1:34:⁠—

“Then said Mary unto the angel. How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?”

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Helice, or Callisto, was a daughter of Lycaon, king of Arcadia. She was one of the attendant nymphs of Diana, who discarded her on account of an amour with Jupiter, for which Juno turned her into a bear. Areas was the offspring of this amour. Jupiter changed them to the constellations of the Great and Little Bear.

Ovid, Metamorphoses II, Addison’s Tr.:⁠—

“But now her son had fifteen summers told,
Fierce at the chase, and in the forest bold;
When, as he beat the woods in quest of prey,
He chanced to rouse his mother where she lay.
She knew her son, and kept him in her sight,
And fondly gazed: the boy was in a fright,
And aimed a pointed arrow at her breast,
And would have slain his mother in the beast;
But Jove forbad, and snatched them through the air
In whirlwinds up to Heaven, and fixed them there;
Where the new constellations nightly rise,
And add a lustre to the Northern skies,

“When Juno saw the rival in her height,
Spangled with stars, and circled round with light,
She sought old Ocean in his deep abodes,
And Tethys, both revered among the gods.
They ask what brings her there: ‘Ne’er ask, says she,
‘What brings me here; Heaven is no place for me.
You’ll see, when Night has covered all things o’er,
Jove’s starry bastard and triumphant whore
Usurp the heavens; you’ll see them proudly roll
In their new